Building Web Applications to Support the Execution of NWM at Watershed Scales

The US National Water Model (NWM) is a newly designed mesoscale hydrologic model that provides streamflow forecasts and other valuable hydrologic information for the continental United States. Since released by NOAA in 2016, it has arisen broad attention and great interest across the entire hydrology community. Various forms of participation and collaboration are being carried out aiming to deliver the advanced modeling technique and its data to researchers and stakeholders in the community who are expected to further transform them into knowledge and intelligence that would eventually advance the science and education in relevant fields. As one of the flagship projects, the CUAHSI HydroShare project is working toward providing a complete solution for storing, managing and sharing NWM data. So far, it has set up the largest open-access data archive for the NWM outputs and has developed several different open-source tools and web applications assisting users with data access. However, there has been an expectation from the community of being able to run a local version of NWM at watershed scales to support some research applications such as cross-model comparison and historical data analysis (e.g. hurricane or flooding events). In this paper, we present ongoing work to develop web applications on top of HydroShare for collecting NWM input data to support model execution at smaller scale watersheds.