OpenHydro: an Object-Oriented Software Framework for the Application of Lumped conceptual Hydrological Model

Currently, although most of lumped conceptual models have the similar model structures and are calibrated with the similar optimization algorithms and the similar objective functions, it is still difficult and tedious to implement them and their calibration in software package because researchers usually have to develop all the required software modules from scratch rather than to reuse these modules in the existing software packages. In order to help researchers to avoid this 'reinventing the wheel' problem, a software framework, OpenHydro, is developed to provide a general framework for researchers to rapidly implement their own lumped conceptual models, optimization algorithms, and objective functions by utilizing the merits of object- oriented approach. Meanwhile, because the weather data and the gauged streamflow data have become available over the Web in several developed countries, such as Canada, OpenHydro also provides a data preparation module to automatically download the data and to calculate the areal precipitation data with the Thiessen polygon method. Finally, because model calibration is still a time-consuming process, OpenHydro provides a simple distributed computation mechanism to allocate the computation load into multiple computers to mitigate this problem.