Work has been successfully performed by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) to synthesize the nation’s hydrologic data. Through the building of a national Hydrologic Information System, the organization has demonstrated a successful structure which promotes data sharing. While the access to and synthesis of observations data has been improved, the same cannot be said for spatiotemporal data. Data available on grids (e.g. meteorological data) has yet to be organized in a manner that can easily be shared. The development of a national Hydrometeorological Information System which incorporates temporal, spatial and spatiotemporal data is necessary for the improved synthesis of hydrologic phenomena which inherently is a coupled process that integrates both principles in hydrologic science and meteorology. / text

There has been a growing recognition in recent years of the need for a standardized means for sharing water data on the web. One response to this need was the development of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS) and its accompanying WaterOneFlow and WaterML protocols. To date, the primary means for accessing data shared using these protocols has been limited to the Microsoft Windows HydroDesktop software, the WaterML R package, and the web based CUAHSI HydroClient which serves as an access point to the CUAHSI HIS database. We recognized the need for a new web-based tool for accessing data from any system that supports WaterOneFlow web services and WaterML and that could be regionally customizable, giving access to the most locally relevant portions of the HIS database, and providing a means for international government agencies, research teams, and others to make use of the accompanying protocols on a locally managed web application. To fill this need, we developed the open source, lightweight, installable web application, Water Data Explorer (WDE) which supports any WaterOneFlow service and can be customized for different regions containing WaterOneFlow web services. The WDE supports data discovery, data visualization, and data download for the selected WaterOneFlow services. The WDE's structure consist of WaterOneFlow catalogs, servers, and individual measurement stations. The WDE provides a different User Interface for administrators and regular users. A server administrator can specify which datasets an individual instance of the WDE supports so that end users of the application can access data from the specified datasets. We modularized the core WaterOneFlow access code into a new open-source Python package called "Pywaterml" which provides the methods used by WDE to discover, visualize, and download data. This thesis presents the design and development of the WDE and the associated Pywaterml package, which was done in partnership with end-users from the WMO and was done in an iterative design-build process. We present two case studies which involve data discovery and visualization from the CUAHSI HIS and WMO Hydrological Observing System (WHOS). Both case studies demonstrate the regional customization of the WDE which allows creation of different custom versions of the same application to meet specific end-user needs. The WDE data discovery in both case studies focuses on discovering the different sites contained in a WaterOneFlow web service, and ontology-based data discovery for the different concept variables in each web service. The data visualization we present, focuses on the time series observation for the different sites in each system. Finally, we tested data downloading in data discovery and visualization by downloading the information of each site to the WDE database and allowing the user to download the time series data.

Geoscience data sharing and processing is very advanced in terms of surface data. Subsurface data sharing has not received the attention that surface data sharing has received and so there are fewer applications or software packages which focus on it. This research is funded by the NSF EarthCube GEO Domain program in an effort to develop a continental-scale repository of 3D subsurface data to facilitate the sharing of complex 3D data and to enable the development of geoprocessing tools and workflows that operate on that data. The work in this thesis is a small part of the EarthCube project with two parts. The first part is to research current tools for 3D subsurface data visualization, specifically virtual globes, and to recommend one for use in the development of the EarthCube project. The second part is to develop an online prototype visualization platform for the EarthCube project referred to as the "Digital Crust" using the recommended virtual globe. Additional work was done with the Digital Crust to develop geoprocessing tools to show the ability for the Digital Crust to work with a data repository. These tools convert geoscience data file types, and interpolate soil cross-sections from borehole log data.

The demand and collection of hydrometeorological data is growing to support hydrologic and hydraulic analyses, and other studies. These data can amount to extensive information that requires sound data management to enable efficient storage, access, and use. While much of the globe is using technology to efficiently collect and store hydrometeorological data, other parts, such as developing countries, are unable to do so. This thesis presents an assessment of available river observations data in Latin American countries in Central America and the Caribbean. The assessment analyzes 1) access to available data, 2) spatial density of data, and 3) the temporal extents of data. This assessment determines that there are sections of the study area that constitute a drought of data or have limited data available.Furthermore, the development of an internationalized HydroServer Lite, a lite-weight web-based application for database and data management, is undertaken. A pilot program of the translated system in Spanish is established with an agency in each of the following countries: Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The internationalized version of HydroServer Lite promises to be a useful tool for these groups. While full implementation is currently underway, benefits include improved database management, access to data, and connectivity to global groups seeking to aid developing countries with hydrometeorological data.

This paper documents the design and creation of an App Library for HydroShare water resources data and software discovery and sharing system. This App Library was developed to simplify the discovery process for using environmental web applications and to lower hosting requirements for such a repository. To accomplish this goal, I created the HydroShare App Library as a standalone web application using the React JavaScript framework. The App Library application uses the existing HydroShare resource connectors to allow the registration of all web applications within the App Library without having external software requirements. This allows the HydroShare App Library to be a centralized location for web app developers to register their tools and models using their preferred software while allowing water resources managers, engineers, scientists, and decision-makers to find these tools in a single location. The developed HydroShare App Library allows the discovery of all web applications that are included in the HydroShare ecosystem and not just CUAHSI-owned web apps. This is done by using a dynamic table with React that automatically updates the user interface without having to reload entire pages. This approach allows this web app to reduce processing for the App Library by only rendering web app entries that are relevant to the current user. This allows the App Library to grow and continue to be effective as more web applications are registered in HydroShare and are discoverable within the App Library.

The Hydrologic Information System Project of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) has successfully created a large-scale prototype Hydrologic Information System (HIS). This system catalogs and provides access to over 23 million time series of hydrologic data, which are distributed across the United States at various academic, research, and governmental data providers. The service-oriented architecture that enables the HIS comprises distributed hydrologic data servers, a centralized series catalog, and various client software applications, and is supported by WaterML, a standardized language for transmission of hydrologic data. The current architectural model, termed the Network-Observations Model, of the HIS relies on a searchable central catalog of series metadata. Harvesting series metadata from large federal data providers, such as the USGS, EPA, and NCDC, has proven a laborious undertaking and involves custom database migration tools. This time-consuming harvesting task, coupled with a multitude of custom-coded solutions at the central series catalog has led to concerns with the long-term sustainability of the current architectural model. A new architectural model, termed the Services Stack Model, is proposed in this thesis. In the proposed model, a catalog of services metadata, rather than of series metadata is used to connect hydrologic data consumers with data providers. Internationally-recognized web service and data encoding standards, including the upcoming WaterML2.0 specification, from the Open Geospatial Consortium are used as the backbone of the new model. The proposed model will hopefully lead to greater acceptance of the CUAHSI-HIS, and result in increased sustainability and reduced maintenance of the system in the long-term. / text

Hydrologic Information Systems (HIS) have emerged as a means to organize, share, and synthesize water data. This work extends current HIS capabilities by providing additional capacity and flexibility for marine physical and chemical observations data and for freshwater and marine biological observations data. These goals are accomplished in two broad and disparate case studies – an HIS implementation for the oceanographic domain as applied to the offshore environment of the Chukchi Sea, a region of the Alaskan Arctic, and a separate HIS implementation for the aquatic biology and environmental flows domains as applied to Texas rivers. These case studies led to the development of a new four-dimensional data cube to accommodate biological observations data with axes of space, time, species, and trait, a new data model for biological observations, an expanded ontology and data dictionary for biological taxa and traits, and an expanded chain-of-custody approach for improved data source tracking. A large number of small studies across a wide range of disciplines comprise the “Long Tail” of science. This work builds upon the successes of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) by applying HIS technologies to two new Long Tail disciplines: aquatic biology and oceanography. In this regard this research improves our understanding of how to deal with collections of biological data stored alongside sensor-based physical data. Based on the results of these case studies, a common framework for water information management for terrestrial and marine systems has emerged which consists of Hydrologic Information Systems for observations data, Geographic Information Systems for geographic data, and Digital Libraries for documents and other digital assets. It is envisioned that the next generation of HIS will be comprised of these three components and will thus actually be a Water Information System of Systems. / text