PLoS ONE (Jan 2017)

The Regional Hydrologic Extremes Assessment System: A software framework for hydrologic modeling and data assimilation.

  • Konstantinos M Andreadis,
  • Narendra Das,
  • Dimitrios Stampoulis,
  • Amor Ines,
  • Joshua B Fisher,
  • Stephanie Granger,
  • Jessie Kawata,
  • Eunjin Han,
  • Ali Behrangi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176506
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 5
p. e0176506

Abstract

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The Regional Hydrologic Extremes Assessment System (RHEAS) is a prototype software framework for hydrologic modeling and data assimilation that automates the deployment of water resources nowcasting and forecasting applications. A spatially-enabled database is a key component of the software that can ingest a suite of satellite and model datasets while facilitating the interfacing with Geographic Information System (GIS) applications. The datasets ingested are obtained from numerous space-borne sensors and represent multiple components of the water cycle. The object-oriented design of the software allows for modularity and extensibility, showcased here with the coupling of the core hydrologic model with a crop growth model. RHEAS can exploit multi-threading to scale with increasing number of processors, while the database allows delivery of data products and associated uncertainty through a variety of GIS platforms. A set of three example implementations of RHEAS in the United States and Kenya are described to demonstrate the different features of the system in real-world applications.