eWaterCycle II

From a hydrological point of view, every field, every street, every part of the world, is different. We understand quite well how water moves through plants and soils at small scales but the medium is never the same from one spot to the next. This is the curse of locality. It is difficult to capture such processes with a single global model. In the last two decades, hydrology has slowly moved into two related fields: global hydrology and catchment hydrology. In global hydrology, making use of new computational resources, scientists use uniform global models at ever increasing spatial and temporal resolutions, forced with satellite data or climate model output to make claims on the global state of the hydrological cycle 1, 2. Parallel to this development, researchers in catchment hydrology, have focussed on deriving, for each catchment that is studied, the best hydrological models for that specific catchment. This is nicely summarized in the overview paper of the last hydrological decade 3. While global hydrologists realize that hydrological processes are locally very different and human influence even more so 4, incorporating the body of local hydrological knowledge is not easy. Catchment hydrologists realize the importance of their work to the global watercycle but often lack the (computational) resources and tools to upscale from their catchment to the global picture. The eWaterCycle II project will build and maintain an e- Infrastructure that allows for quick and safe inclusion of submodels and model concepts into global hydrological models, leading to a better understanding of the Hydrological cycle. The foreseen e-infrastructure will have a number of unique advantages, including an ability for knowledge gap discovery, machine-assisted model curation, and easily changeable model parts. In this work we will present the how we will achieve the goals of the recently started eWaterCycle II project over its three year runtime. We will show a demo of a first prototype environment where scientist can run, compare and alter different hydrological models that focus on the same region and use the same input data sources. This will work even if the underlying hydrological models are written in different programming languages without exposing the hydrologists doing the comparison to these technical intricacies. Although the eWaterCycle II project focusses on the hydrological setting, the underlying framework will be suitable outside of hydrology, wherever a collaborative environment is required. eScience aspects such as large scale data assimilation (DA) techniques, generic multi-model multi-scale environments, FAIR data as well as FAIR software, will all benefit from research done in this project.