Cloud-based Learning in the Water Sciences using HydroShare and Jupyter Notebooks

Fluency in software tools, libraries, and programming languages are becoming an essential skills for water scientists that can directly influence the effectiveness and efficiency of their professional work. Graduate students must often learn these skills through "trial by fire", as they conduct research. The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc. (CUAHSI) as made a significant investment to develop community cyberinfrastructure (CI) and software tools to support water science research, training, and education. This combines domain specific data repositories, such as HydroShare and the Hydrologic Information System (HIS), with cloud-based compute environments, for example Jupyter notebooks, to offer a learning platform with a low barrier of entry for both instructors and students. Altogether, this work supports use cases ranging from the design of educational modules and hosting workshops to hydrologic modeling applications and data analysis. This has been used and evaluated in workshop, classroom, and cyberseminar settings and we will present our general approach for constructing and effectively presenting scientific material using this CI, discuss lessons learned through these efforts, and offer recommendations to the water science community for cloud-based scientific education using CUAHSI data services.