Hydroinformatics

The School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University are advertising for a new Assistant Professor in Hydroinformatics. (A slightly different description is given in the Hydroinformatics LinkedIn group).

We encourage parties interested in hosting the 11th Hydroinformatics Conference (HIC2014) to notify the Hydroinformatics Committee chair (Shie-Yui Liong) or respond to the call in the LinkedIn group.

Interested parties could present a short presentation at the upcoming Hydroinformatics Committee meeting during the IAHR Congress in Brisbane (29 June, at 6pm).

An official call (with detailed selection criteria) will be announced in September 2011, with the approximate deadline in December and the final announcement of the successful bidder in February 2012.

With the approval of the Hydroinformatics Committee, a “Hydroinformatics vision” Working Group (WG) was created at a meeting during the Tianjin Hydroinformatics Conference (2010). The ambition of the WG was to describe the current situation based on years of experience and involvement with the hydroinformatics community and activities, to enumerate a number of future (i.e., next 10 years) developments and possibilities, as are foreseen by the WG today, to produce a point of departure for further discussions and exchanges of views and, at the same time, to propose a number of practical actions, to be implemented now, and of possible aims for the future activities.

After intensive consultation, the WG members and a number of other colleagues have produced a draft document that is now available for discussion.

A discussion on the report has been opened on the Hydroinformatics LinkedIn group. To keep all discussion in one place, comments are closed on this post.

I missed this, but apparently some of Delft 3D has been available as open source since January. According to Deltares,

Delft3D is a world leading 2D/3D modeling suite to investigate hydrodynamics, sediment transport and morphology and water quality for fluvial, estuarine and coastal environments.

The announcement concludes:

Please note that only Delft3D FLOW + MOR + WAVE are going open source. These modules offer unique opportunities for collaboration. For other software distributed by Deltares, there are no changes in policy.

I’m aware of some open source 2D hydraulic modelling codes, including Anuga (interesting for its mixed Python/C code and the fact that it is designed to integrate with numpy). As far as I know, though, there are no open source 1D codes available. Nor even one that is freely available and can be run “headless” (from the command line, with no GUI). I’d be interested in pointers if that’s not true.

Hydroinformatics 2012 will take place in Hamburg, 14-18 July 2012.

Important dates:

• Abstract submission deadline: August 1, 2011
• Acceptance of abstract: September 19, 2011
• Full paper submission: January 16, 2012
• Announcement of acceptance: March 30, 2012
• Revised paper submission: April,16 2012

UNESCO-IHE and the Envirogrids project ran a symposium and workshops last week (18-19 April 2011) about interoperability of environmental information and modelling systems. Andreja Jonoski writes:

The OpenWater Symposium and Workshops were organised at UNESCO-IHE in collaboration with the large EU FP7 research project Envirogrids, which has the goal to develop a grid-based infrastructure for spatially distributed environmental data from the region of the Black Sea catchment.

The symposium and the workshops were focused on sharing of experiences to support increasing interoperability of new ICT based systems, systems of systems and standards in the water domain. Several initiatives are currently being undertaken to develop open standards and interfaces under GEO, OGC, OpenMI Association and many research projects around the world. OpenWater was organised as a series of invited presentations, dedicated workshops, and oral/poster presentations.

Workshops were organised on the following topics:

• Bringing GEOSS and INSPIRE services into practice: Publish and share data and metadata using OGC services and ISO standards
• SWAT-CUP: Automatic calibration procedures for SWAT modellers
• MapWindow: Open GIS software and Environmental Modelling
• EnviroGRIDS portal: Tools for modelling and data processing in the Black Sea Basin

The OpenWater symposium addressed one key aspect that needs to be tackled with open standards and approaches, namely software interoperability  (in this case interoperability of models and data) Software developed by different persons and organisations, data in different formats, different protocols for sharing these data, etc…, these are all obstacles for achieving desired interoperability. Various initiatives are currently dealing with these problems when it comes to the water domain, all aiming to achieve some sort of standardisation:

• Dynamic integration of different models using Open Modelling Interface (OpenMI) – a European initiative led primarily by partners such as Deltares, DHI, and HR Wallingford
• The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) already developed standards for sharing geospatial information, and its Hydrology Working Group is looking for ways how standards related to hydrological information can become part of OGC (it seems that the Water Markup Language – or WaterML is on its way to become one such standard for sharing time series of water observations)
• As the Internet becomes the medium for sharing such information, particularly using web services, various organisations are picking up these standards and  developing such services that provide useful water-related information

It is very valuable that both open source and free software providers , together with commercial software providers are jointly participating in these initiatives, many of which were presenting their work during OpenWater.

Edited by Cameron Neylon, a new open access journal:

Open Research Computation publishes peer reviewed articles that describe the development, capacities, and uses of software designed for use by researchers. Submissions relating to software for use in any area of research are welcome as are articles dealing with algorithms, useful code snippets, as well as large applications or web services, and libraries. Open Research Computation differs from other journals with a software focus in its requirement for the software source code to be made available under an Open Source Initiative compliant license, and in its assessment of the quality of documentation and testing of the software. In addition to articles describing software Open Research Computation also welcomes submissions that review or describe developments relating to software based tools for research. These include, but are not limited to, reviews or proposals for standards, discussion of best practice in research software development, educational and support resources and tools for researchers that develop or use software based tools.

The bar is set high:

Our selection criteria don’t depend on how important the research problem is, but on the availability, documentation, and testing of the code. We expect the examples given in these papers to be reproducible, by which we mean that the software, the source code, the data, and the methodology are provided and described well enough that it is possible to reproduce those examples.  By applying high standards, and by working with authors to help them reach those standards we aim to provide a venue which is both useful and prestigious.

On rivers-list, Azin Amini writes:

It is our pleasure to introduce you the online river forecast system “swissrivers.ch”. The website provides forecast for river flows as well as lake and dam reservoir levels in whole Switzerland.

The forecasts are updated two times per day for the next 30 hours. The data is available for 2500 catchment areas, 1500 rivers, as well as 60 lakes and reservoirs.  With the intuitive geographic interface, access to the information is particularly user friendly.

The forecast calculations are performed in e-dric.ch office using the RS3.0 software, an in-house program of the company.

In addition to the real-time hydrological forecast, the swissrivers.ch system provides a platform for hydrological analysis of all Swiss catchment areas. It allows efficient computation of indicators such as average discharges, flood discharges, low water levels and water regimes. It can also be used for the analysis of climate change impacts.

You can check it out on www.swissrivers.ch

Here’s a screenshot:

Screenshot of swissrivers.ch

To get to a chart like that, you need to zoom in two levels then click on the site. The last step doesn’t work in the Chrome browser.

Via the LinkedIn “Flood Professionals” group: Halcrow have released a Flood Alert app for the iPhone (an Android version is promised):

This flood warning application allows users to get real time updates on flood warnings near them, at locations important to them and for the rest of England and Wales.

I’m intrigued by this. I’ll certainly install the app and give it a go (it’s free, after all) but I struggle to imagine a native app as a good way of disseminating flood warnings. During an event an app could provide a useful tool for those struggling to deal with the flood (but only those with supported phones, and only until they get wet), but I’m not entirely convinced about that either.

Note that I’m all for more dissemination and better interfaces. It’s the choice of native apps for particular types of smartphones that I wonder about.

I’m intrigued as to whether this comment implies Agency commitment or just optimism on the part of the developers:

Additional feeds for rainfall, river levels and sea conditions will also be included within Flood Alert once made available by the Environment Agency.

I also wonder what the relationship with the Environment Agency is – did they provide any funding for this or is it a Halcrow venture? And if so, what’s the business model?

Dragan Savic has established a LinkedIn group for discussion of Hydroinformatics. That group replaces the mailing lists that were available, briefly, at hydroinformatics-community.com.

Join us to discuss development, implementation and evaluation of hydroinformatics tools, conference activities and any other topics related to the hydroinformatics community.