Enabling Collaborative Numerical Modeling in Hydrology using Knowledge Infrastructure

Knowledge infrastructure is an intellectual framework for creating, sharing, and distributing knowledge. The future of hydrology will see increasing use of knowledge infrastructure to address common barriers to hydrologic prediction as demonstrated in three computational narratives: physical process modeling education, replicating published model results, and reusing published models to extend research. We outline six critical functional requirements: 1) workflows designed for new users; 2) community-supported collaborative web platform; 3) distributed data storage; 4) software environment; 5) personalized cloud-based high-performance computing platform; and 6) a standardized open source modeling framework. Our methods meet these functional requirements by providing three interactive computational narratives for hands-on, problem-based research using Landlab on HydroShare. Landlab is an open-source toolkit for building, coupling, and exploring two-dimensional numerical models. HydroShare is an online collaborative environment for the sharing of data and models. These methods accelerate knowledge development by providing a suite of modular and interoperable process components that allows students, domain experts, collaborators, researchers, and sponsors to learn by exploring shared data and modeling resources. The system is designed to support uses on the continuum from fully-developed modeling applications to prototyping research software tools.