Data Publication Guide Added

A Data Publication Guide has been added to this site, which provides the steps needed to publish data in the CUAHSI HIS. This guide will be accessible from the link on the navigation bar towards the top of this page and includes two sections:

• Setting Up Your Database
• Creating and Registering Your Web Service

These two topics provide the basics for HIS time series data publication, but the guide does not yet include some additional, more advanced features such as configuring the HydroServer Website application or setting up the HydroServer Map application.

2012 in Review: Data Sources Added to the HIS Catalog

The number of data services registered in HIS continued to grow in 2012 with 26 new web services registered with the central catalog. These new services include data from university researchers, citizen science organizations, as well as federal agencies. Here are a few notable additions...

Shale Network - As I highlighted in a previous post, the Shale Network project is investigating the potential impact of natural gas extraction in the Marcellus Shale region. The database is being developed from multiple sources with multiple partners; CUAHSI is participating through hosting and helping to maintain the database as well as through providing training and support in using HIS.

Kansas State Daily Weather Data - This service, from researchers at KSU, includes daily weather data collected at 14 sites throughout the state of Kansas. The observed variables in this database include net radiation, temperature (air & soil), wind speed & direction, evapotranspiration, and precipitation.

4 New NASA Services - NASA has registered 4 new services from the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) and Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS).

• NLDAS Hourly Mosaic Data
• GLDAS 3-hourly Noah Data
• NLDAS Hourly Primary Forcing Data
• NLDAS Hourly NOAH Data

Ipswich River Watershed Association RiverWatch Program - Another service that I have previously highlighed is the IRWA RiverWatch program, which has citizen scientists collect data to monitor the health of the Ipswich River (located in Northeast Massachusetts). The observations published in HIS include dissolved oxygen and water temperature. 

An Introduction to WaterOneFlow Web Services

A cornerstone of the CUAHSI HIS is a family of unique web services that enable data transmission. Web services are computer applications that interact, and exchange information, with other computers over the internet. The family of web services that has been developed for and employed by HIS is called WaterOneFlow (WOF).

WOF uses a set of functions to query to retrieve information from a HydroServer and the data is returned in a specific type of XML, WaterML, which has been specifically designed to transmit water data across the internet. The functions used are as follows:

Get Sites: Returns sites in a data source including location
Get Site Info: Returns information about any time series located at a specific site such as variables measured, start & end dates of observations, and units.
Get Variable Info: Returns information about a specific times series such as units, value type, data type, and sample medium.
Get Values: Returns values of a specific time series.

An easy way to become acquainted with these web services is by using HydroExcel, which is one of the CUAHSI clients that has been developed for retrieving water data registered in HIS. HydroExcel is Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that  uses VBA macros and an object library called HydroObjects to communicate with and retrieve data from WaterOneFlow web services.

HydroExcel is especially useful if you know what data source you are interested in, but is not as useful if you are trying to search over multiple data sources. When first opening HydroExcel, you are presented with the list of registered data services in HIS Central. To look at data, and metadata, you must simply copy the WSDL Location from a respective service and paste this URL into the WSDL Location box at the top of the Data Source tab.

The Data Source tab of HydroExcel. Be sure to enable macros and to refresh the list of services from HIS Central when the file is first opened.

After pasting the URL for your data source, you can invoke the individual web services by clicking on the buttons on the data source sheet (i.e. Get Sites, Get Variables, etc.). Clicking these will bring you to other sheets in the file where additional functionality is available.