Project and Water News

Science teachers for grades 8 through 12 are invited to register for CI-WATER for Science Educators, a two-hour professional development workshop for integrating water science and modeling resources into the science curriculum.

The workshop will be held at the Utah’s Hogle Zoo Education Center on Tuesday, August 4 from 1 to 3 p.m. The event is free to participants but seating is limited, so reservations are required.

Participants will learn about CI-WATER educator resources and engage in activities they can bring to their students.

“Water is no longer something we can simply take for granted. This workshop will help teachers prepare students for the future in which computer modeling will play an even greater role in water resource management,” says Chris Schmitz, Education Director at Hogle Zoo.

To register for the workshop or for more information, email Utah’s Hogle Zoo’s, Academic and Community Programs Coordinator, Suzanne Zgraggen.

CI-WATER is rolling out new models, development tools and web apps in the coming weeks. Check out these recent additions for water resource managers, researchers and web developers on our Modeling Apps and Tools page:

CI-WATER Data Services.  Access datasets commonly used as input to Hydrologic models for the Western US.

HydroGate.  Access heterogeneous HPC storage and computational resources using SSH via this science gateway service.

Utah Energy Balance (UEB) Parallel.  Take advantage of high-performance cyberinfrastructure with this parallel version of the UEB snowmelt model to simulate snow processes in large watersheds at high resolution.

Utah Energy Balance (UEB) Data Input Tools.  Set up a UEB model for any watershed in the western US using standard data products accessible through CI-WATER data services.

Tethys Platform Training videos.  Learn how to use GeoServer, work with file datasets using a CKAN server, manage versioning with Git and GitHub, and create spatially-enabled databases and perform geoprocessing tasks with PostGIS.

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With support from the National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF-EPSCoR), CI-WATER researchers have found a new approach that may revolutionize large-scale water modeling methods.

The discovery is of an alternative to a partial differential equation (PDE) that was published more than eighty years ago by soil physicist Lorenzo Adolph Richards.

“Previous solutions to the Richards equation are computationally expensive to run, unreliable and suffer from convergence problems,” says Dr. Fred Ogden, a CI-WATER Principle Investigator and lead author of the paper reporting the discovery. “We were looking for a faster, more reliable approach that conserves mass and is continuous.”

It seems that Fred and his collaborators have found it. An eight-month test to compare the predictive capabilities of the Richards’ PDE to the new “Finite-Water Content” solution in loam soil resulted in a minor variance, yet the latter solution appears to be robust, complete and more computationally economical—important when running data-massive simulations such as CI-WATER’s high-resolution, large-scale ADHydro model.

Details of the work were published in “A new general 1-D vadose zone flow solution method,” recently appearing in Water Resources Research, a publication of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). ADHydro, and other CI-WATER products, will be featured during the CUAHSI 3rd Annual Hydroinfomatics Conference next month.

Participants in the 3rd Annual CUAHSI Hydroinformatics Conference will have the opportunity to engage in a hands-on exploration of a powerful new model for water resource researchers: ADHydro.

Created by a CI-WATER team led by University of Wyoming’s Dr. Fred Ogden, ADHydro has been designed from the ground up to operate in a massively parallel computing environment for efficient, large-scale simulations. The innovative model uses an unstructured mesh that allows users to direct high resolution visualization only where needed.

CI-WATER is holding a one-day workshop at the 3rd Annual CUAHSI Conference on Hydroinformatics on Friday, July 17, 2015. Due to time restrictions, participants in this free workshop must have Linux and other experience as detailed here.

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