eWaterCycle II

Understanding water movement on a global scale is essential for society to predict floods, droughts and the effect of landuse on water balance. However, large scale hydrology is difficult because from a hydrological point of view, every field, every street, and every part of the world is unique. We are able to understand and describe how water moves in these locations at a small scale, but due to the extreme spatial variability it is difficult to capture such processes at a global scale. We call this the curse of locality.

On top of this, existing hydrological models exist in a huge variety of programming languages, standards etc. which limits their re-useability and reproducibility.

In the eWaterCycle II project, we are developing a framework in which hydrological modellers can work together in a collaborative environment. In this enviroment, they can, for example, easily;

• Combine models and data independent of programming languages.
• Compare models to other models of the same area.
• Perform data assimilation to improve model accuracy.
• Reproduce the results obtained by their peers.

Additionally, we are actively involving the global community of hydrologists through our OpenHYDRO platform to;

• Ensure our platform meets the needs of the scientific community.
• Organize community challenges to explore underrepresented research areas.

The final goal of the eWatercycle II project is to enable the collaborative development of a global hydrological model through the combination of the existing local models. In our collaborative environment hydrologists can upload and analyze their models and contribute to the greater goal of a community built and shared global hydrological model.