Transcript CUAHSI Web Services and Hydrologic Information Systems, Nov 30

CUAHSI Web Services and
Hydrologic Information Systems
By David R. Maidment, University of Texas at Austin
Collaborators: Ilya Zaslavsky and Reza Wahadj, San Diego
Supercomputer Center, Tim Whiteaker, Venkatesh
Merwade, UT Austin, Steve Ansari, NCDC, Ken Lanfear
and Mark Hamill, USGS, Jonathan Goodall, Duke
University
WSTB Committee on Integrated Observations
for Hydrologic and Related Sciences , Dec 1, 2005
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HIS Goals
• Hydrologic Data Access System – better
access to a large volume of high quality
hydrologic data
• Support for Observatories – synthesizing
hydrologic data for a region
• Advancement of Hydrologic Science –
data modeling and advanced analysis
• Hydrologic Education – better data in the
classroom, basin-focused teaching
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CUAHSI Hydrologic Data Access System
(HDAS)
EPA
USGS
NCDC
NASA
NWS
Observatory Data
A common data window for accessing, viewing
and downloading hydrologic information
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NWIS Station
Information in HDAS
http://river.sdsc.edu/HDAS
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Observation Site Files
Ameriflux Towers
USGS NWIS Stations
Automated Surface Observing System
Climate Reference Network
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Observation Site Map for US
USGS NWIS
ASOS
Climate Research Network
Ameriflux
+ others…….
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Neuse Basin with all points
NWIS Streamflow and Water Quality
ASOS
NWIS Groundwater
NARR
Ameriflux
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Filtered Site Map
NWIS Streamflow and
Water Quality
ASOS
NARR
Ameriflux
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http://public.ornl.gov/ameriflux/
Ameriflux site map
Building each web service
requires a site map and
a web services library
Ameriflux towers measure vertical fluxes
of water, heat, CO2
Web services library
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Storet
NAWQA
Ameriflux
LTER
NCDC
NCAR
NWIS
CUAHSI Web Services
Excel
Visual Basic
ArcGIS
C/C++
Matlab
Fortran
Access
SAS
Some operational services
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Direct and Indirect Web Services
• Direct web service
– The data agency provides direct querying
ability into its archives through SOAP or
OpenDAP (NCDC)
• Indirect web service
– CUAHSI constructs a “web page mimic”
service, housed at SDSC, that
programmatically mimics the manual use of
an agency’s web pages (USGS, Ameriflux)
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HydroObjects Library
• CUAHSI has
developed a
HydroObjects
Library with web
service wrappers
that know where to
access each web
service and how to
interpret its output
User Application
(Excel, ArcGIS, …..)
HydroObjects Library
with web service wrappers
for NWIS, Ameriflux, NCDC, …
Direct or Indirect
web services
Web data
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CUAHSI Web Services Library for NWIS
http://river.sdsc.edu/NWISTS/nwis.asmx
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These web services are available now for you to use in your programming
Accessing Ameriflux data directly from
Excel using CUAHSI web services
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Transfer of research results
• CUAHSI web services for NWIS were announced at a
cyberseminar on Friday Oct 28
• On Wednesday Nov 2, Jason Love, from a private
firm, RESPEC, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, posted
on the EPA Basins list server: “Occasionally one comes
across something that is worth sharing; the CUAHSI Hydrologic
Information Systems - Web Services Library for NWIS is a valuable
tool for those of us interested in rapidly acquiring and processing
data from the USGS, e.g., calibrating models and performing
watershed assessments.”
• He provided a tutorial on how to use the services from
Matlab (which CUAHSI had not developed)
• Technology transfer took less than 1 week!
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Standards are the Key
• standards …
– Industry standards already exists:
• SOAP = Simple Object Access Protocol
• WSDL = Web Service Definition Language
– Hydrologic community must add their own to the mix:
• HTSS = Hydrologic Time Series Service
• HML = Hydrologic Markup Language
• software development …
– If we adopt SOAP and WSDL standards, we can
utilize industry support
– Hydrology standards will increase interoperability and
code reuse
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CUAHSI Web Services
Web application: Data Portal
Your application
• Excel, ArcGIS, Matlab
• Fortran, C/C++, Visual Basic
• Hydrologic model
• …………….
Your operating system
• Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac
Internet
Web Services
Library
Simple
Object
Access
Protocol
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Impact of Web Services
• CUAHSI web data services are significantly
simplifying user access to federal water
observation data
• This will increase appreciation of the collective
information content of these data
• Next step is to set the data in context of their
environment – Digital Watershed
• Web services may turn out to be as important or
even supersede web pages as a data delivery
mechanism
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