HydroPortal Will Experience Service Disruption this Friday 3/1/2013

Please be advised that HydroPortal, CUAHSI’s server that hosts a number of databases in the HIS Catalog, will experience service disruption this Friday, March 1 as CUAHSI relocates to a new office suite. During this time, data from the following publicly registered web services will be unavailable: 

• Hassberge catchment long-Term monitoring data

• Ipswich River Watershed Association

• Kansas State University Daily Weather Data

• La Selva Hydrologic Data

• Muddy River Water Quality Monitoring Project

• Shale Network

• Mountain Meadow Restoration with a Changing Climate

• Glacial Ridge Project

• Weiherbach catchment long-Term monitoring data

• WRRC Acid Rain Monitoring Project

The outage will likely last through the morning, but we will try to get the server relocated and back up as soon as possible. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.

CUAHSI Community Teleconferences on Informatics

On the first Wednesday of each month, CUAHSI hosts a community teleconference on Informatics that features research and projects involving, or are of interest to, the water science community. We have started to record these calls, so if you are unable to join the call you can still view the presentations!

To view previous calls, visit this page on the CUAHSI website. As of now, only February's call is available, which included presentations about The Swiss Experiment Platform and Sustainable Environment Actionable Data.

Can I Publish Gridded Data in HIS?

If you don't mind converting your data, then, yes!

The CUAHSI HIS was developed with the specific structure of a time series data in mind. This structure is typical of data from a stream sensor or other observations at a specific location. But what of other data types that are gridded such as precipitation estimates and model results? These data have not been publishable in HIS in the traditional manner, but it is possible to convert such data into the time series structure. There are multiple data sources registered in the HIS Catalog that have utilized such a conversion process; included in these are Multi-Sensor Precipitation Estimates from National Weather Service River Forecasting Centers as well as NASA NLDAS data. This approach is described in a recent Computers & Geosciences article:

John A. McEnery, Paul W. McKee, Gregory P. Shelton, Ryan W. Ramsey, Hydrologic information server for benchmark precipitation dataset, Computers & Geosciences, Volume 50, January 2013, Pages 145-153, ISSN 0098-3004, 10.1016/j.cageo.2012.08.005.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009830041200283X)

The authors demonstrate this technique with NEXRAD radar data , the significance of which is described in the article's abstract:

"Over the past two decades, with the advent of NEXRAD radar, science to measure and record rainfall has improved dramatically. However, much existing data has not been readily available for public access or transferable among the agricultural, engineering and scientific communities. This project takes advantage of the existing CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System ODM model and tools to bridge the gap between data storage and data access, providing an accepted standard interface for internet access to the largest time-series dataset of NEXRAD precipitation data ever assembled."

See below for a few examples of data sources in the HIS Catalog that have used this method:

• NLDAS Hourly Primary Forcing Data
• NLDAS Hourly NOAH Data
• NWS-Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center Hourly Multi Sensor Precipitation Estimates

Shale Network at the Rutgers' Earth and Planetary Sciences Spring Colloquium

Professor Sue Brantley, who is the Principal Investigator of the Shale Network project, will be presenting next week at Rutgers' Earth and Planetary Sciences Spring Colloquium. Professor Brantley's presentation, entitled Hydraulic Fracturing of Shales and Water Quality, will discuss how the Shale Network has gathered and analyzed water quality data in the Marcellus Shale region to examine the potential impacts of exploitation of natural gas through hydraulic fracturing (or fracking). The database that the Shale Network has developed is hosted by CUAHSI and the data are available in HydroDesktop through the power of HIS, which I highlighted in a previous post.

Details:

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Wright-Rieman Auditorium, Busch Campus

12:00 p.m.

Introduction to Agile Development

Scrum enables you to keep everything visible. It allows the team to know exactly what’s going on and make adjustments to the project to keep it moving forward.

Scrum Agile Development is a framework for software development that the has been influencing development in the CUAHSI community, which includes the approach taken with the development of HydroDesktop. In this iterative approach, a backlog of tasks is created, these tasks are prioritized, then the highest priority tasks are developed during a sprint that lasts for a specified duration. For HydroDesktop, we use Codeplex to create a backlog of issues and tasks and we have weekly meetings on Monday to identify tasks and discuss progress. The developers then work during the rest of the week to resolve the prioritized issues or develop high priority new features. The process then repeats itself the next week.

For more, check out this post on the Elementool Blog.