CUAHSI Web Services and Hydrologic Information Systems

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CUAHSI Web Services and Hydrologic Information
Systems

• By David R. Maidment, University of Texas at
  Austin
• Collaborators Ilya Zaslavsky and Reza Wahadj,
  San Diego Supercomputer Center, Tim Whiteaker,
  Venkatesh Merwade, UT Austin, Steve Ansari, NCDC,
  Ken Lanfear and Mark Hamill, USGS, Jonathan
  Goodall, Duke University

WSTB Committee on Integrated Observations for
Hydrologic and Related Sciences , Dec 1, 2005
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HIS Goals

• Hydrologic Data Access System better access to
  a large volume of high quality hydrologic data
• Support for Observatories synthesizing
  hydrologic data for a region
• Advancement of Hydrologic Science data modeling
  and advanced analysis
• Hydrologic Education better data in the
  classroom, basin-focused teaching

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CUAHSI Hydrologic Data Access System(HDAS)
NASA
NCDC
EPA
NWS
USGS
Observatory Data
A common data window for accessing, viewing and
downloading hydrologic information

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NWIS Station Information in HDAS
http//river.sdsc.edu/HDAS
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Observation Site Files
Ameriflux Towers
Automated Surface Observing System
Climate Reference Network
USGS NWIS Stations
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Observation Site Map for US
USGS NWIS
ASOS
Climate Research Network
Ameriflux
others.
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Neuse Basin with all points
NWIS Streamflow and Water Quality
ASOS
Ameriflux
NWIS Groundwater
NARR
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Filtered Site Map
NWIS Streamflow and Water Quality
ASOS
Ameriflux
NARR
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http//public.ornl.gov/ameriflux/
Ameriflux site map
Building each web service requires a site map
and a web services library
Ameriflux towers measure vertical fluxes of
water, heat, CO2
Web services library
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NAWQA
Ameriflux
Storet
LTER
NCDC
NCAR
NWIS
CUAHSI Web Services
Excel
Visual Basic
ArcGIS
C/C
Matlab
Fortran
Access
SAS
Some operational services
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Direct and Indirect Web Services

• Direct web service
• The data agency provides direct querying ability
  into its archives through SOAP or OpenDAP (NCDC)
• Indirect web service
• CUAHSI constructs a web page mimic service,
  housed at SDSC, that programmatically mimics the
  manual use of an agencys web pages (USGS,
  Ameriflux)

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HydroObjects Library

• CUAHSI has developed a HydroObjects Library with
  web service wrappers that know where to access
  each web service and how to interpret its output

User Application (Excel, ArcGIS, ..)
HydroObjects Library with web service wrappers
for NWIS, Ameriflux, NCDC,
Direct or Indirect web services
Web data
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CUAHSI Web Services Library for NWIS
http//river.sdsc.edu/NWISTS/nwis.asmx
These web services are available now for you to
use in your programming
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Accessing Ameriflux data directly from Excel
using CUAHSI web services
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Transfer of research results

• CUAHSI web services for NWIS were announced at a
  cyberseminar on Friday Oct 28
• On Wednesday Nov 2, Jason Love, from a private
  firm, RESPEC, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,
  posted on the EPA Basins list server
  Occasionally one comes across something that is
  worth sharing the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information
  Systems - Web Services Library for NWIS is a
  valuable tool for those of us interested in
  rapidly acquiring and processing data from the
  USGS, e.g., calibrating models and performing
  watershed assessments.
• He provided a tutorial on how to use the services
  from Matlab (which CUAHSI had not developed)
• Technology transfer took less than 1 week!

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Standards are the Key

• standards
• Industry standards already exists
• SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol
• WSDL Web Service Definition Language
• Hydrologic community must add their own to the
  mix
• HTSS Hydrologic Time Series Service
• HML Hydrologic Markup Language
• software development
• If we adopt SOAP and WSDL standards, we can
  utilize industry support
• Hydrology standards will increase
  interoperability and code reuse

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CUAHSI Web Services
Web application Data Portal

• Your application
• Excel, ArcGIS, Matlab
• Fortran, C/C, Visual Basic
• Hydrologic model
• .

• Your operating system
• Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac

Internet
Simple Object Access Protocol
Web Services Library
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Impact of Web Services

• CUAHSI web data services are significantly
  simplifying user access to federal water
  observation data
• This will increase appreciation of the collective
  information content of these data
• Next step is to set the data in context of their
  environment Digital Watershed
• Web services may turn out to be as important or
  even supersede web pages as a data delivery
  mechanism