Advance the predictive capabilities of the NextGen National Water Model

NOAA has a critical need for a hydrologic-water resource modeling system that can be scaled from communities, hillsides, forest stands, farms and reservoirs, to the nation, can be configured flexibly for multiple operational goals such as short-term forecasts and longer-term diagnostic predictions, and that takes advantage of supercomputer resources efficiently and effectively and also runs well on commodity hardware. It also needs to be a common system to collect the best algorithms and computational advances in the hydrological sciences, water engineering, and high-performance computing community. The system should be ready to couple with coastal and water quality models and integrable into NOAA’s Unified Forecast System. A unified community hydrologic model is therefore needed to increase the value of investments in hydrologic science. The overall goal of this subproject is to collaborate with scientists at NOAA’s National Water Center (NWC) to advance the predictive capabilities of the National Water Model (NWM). The work proposed will extend the NextGen Water Resources Modeling framework to integrate physical process representations across multiple levels of granularity. This will be done by representing the different aspects of land biogeophysics as generic components (e.g., sub-domains of vegetation, snow, vadose zone, etc., and state equations for mass and enthalpy), and incorporating and evaluating modeling approaches developed by different groups for sub-systems in the model. The proposed work will aim to improve algorithms for dominant hydrological processes across North America (e.g., glacier hydrology, wetland connectivity, etc.) and advance capabilities in large-domain parameter estimation. Our proposed work will help the NWC meet their goal of developing a numerically robust and computationally efficient hydrologic model that can faithfully represent the dominant hydrologic processes across large geographical domains.