Authors: Riley Hales, Rachel Huber, Yubin Baaniya, Jim Nelson, Thomas Roden
Title: Technologies from NASA, NOAA, and International Hydrology Projects with applications in CIROH
Abstract: This poster presents a survey of three activities funded by peer programs within NASA and NOAA which are particularly noteworthy to CIROH projects and the National Water Center. First, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) released the TDX-Hydro streams and catchments dataset in 2023. It has global coverage derived from 12-meter elevation data with elevation preprocessing, delineation using TauDEM, and corrections to the results to better align with optical data. We present corrections to this dataset which remove errors and add attributes necessary for channel routing as done by the National Water Model. Second, hydrologic models are often designed for flooding related applications, but they can also be used to understand the status and short-term outlook of current river conditions. We present a web app created for a NASA SERVIR project in East and South Africa which helps stakeholders understand their rivers. Current modeled streamflow data is compared to monthly averages from the retrospective simulation to calculate drought and low flow indicators and display the information through graphs and maps. Third, evaluating hydrological models requires comparing simulated outputs to gauge data. To do this on a large scale, all the gauges need to be paired with the model’s feature which best corresponds to that gauge’s measurements. Two significant challenges for performing this step with international datasets are the limited availability of proper metadata for each gauge and uncertainty in the location of gauges. We present a setup where HydroServer is used as a central platform for storing gauge measurements and metadata. We present a process to identify the best fitting model feature with each gauge and store that information in HydroServer. This allows seamless assessment of our global model’s performance.