Data to Support Critical Zone Science: the CUAHSI Water Data Center and Digital Crust Initiatives

Jennifer Arrigo1, Richard Hooper1, Alva Couch1,2, Ying Fan Reinfelder3, Norman Jones4 1CUAHSI; 2Tufts University; 3Rutgers University; 4Brigham Young University

EAR-0753521 EAR-1251557

Overview Data Initiatives to Support Critical Zone Science

CUAHSI initiatives and facilities seek to provide the community infrastructure and support to enable interdisciplinary critical zone science. This poster presents information on two key CUAHSI initiatives: a Water Data Center (WDC) to support archiving, access and discovery of water data time series, and an NSF-USGS supported effort on envisioning the cyberinfrastructure necessary to build a Digital Crust" data system to support earth system science. Both these efforts address CUAHSI strategic goal of improving and promoting access to data, information and models and seek to advance water science broadly writ by supporting activities that promote discovering, integrating and analyzing data from multiple sources. The CUAHSI WDC will concentrate upon providing physical, biological, and chemical time series data collected at fixed points or on moving platforms from sensors primarily (but not exclusively) in the medium of water. The Digital Crust initiative brings together geoscientists and geoinformatics experts to explore state-of-art techniques for large-scale geologic models and data infrastructure for developing a comprehensive, large scale crustal permeability data set and 3D data system, that will that enable flexible support for regional to continentalscale fluid flow modeling. We are seeking community input and data contributions to the proposed water data center, participation from the earth science community in envisioning and prototyping a continental-scale 3D subsurface data system, and collaboration and connections with other groups and facilities that support critical zone science and data.

The Digital Crust Initiative

Background The CHyMP Initiative From 2009 2011, the Community Hydrologic Modeling Platform (CHyMP) initiative held three workshops1,2,3, the ultimate goal of which was to produce recommendations and an implementation plan to establish a community modeling program that enables comprehensive simulation of water anywhere on the North American continent. To achieve such a vision will require substantial investment in human and cyber-infrastructure and significant advances in the science of hydrologic modeling and spatial scaling. CHyMP produced several recommendations. CUAHSI and the university community continue to advance community modeling and implement these recommendations through several related and follow on efforts. One key aspect of these recommendations was DATASET DEVELOPMENT. The NSF EarthCube initiative is one avenue for meeting this needs. A Key Recommendation
Our current knowledge of the subsurface is limiting our ability to truly integrate soil and groundwater into large scale models, and to
answering critical science questions with societal relevance (i.e. groundwaters influence on climate).

Groundwater and surface water is a single resource (Figure 1, from Winter et al. [1998]). Their flow paths cross one another at multiple times on their journal to the ocean. Carried by the fluxes of water, energy and nutrients are exchanged, initiating loops of interactions and feedbacks with the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems on land, and affecting the earths climate system through physical, chemical and biological pathways.

THE VISION

Support, Development and Expansion of HIS Technology

The CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS) is an internet-based system for sharing hydrologic data. It consists of three components: a client (HydroDesktop),a data server stack (HydroServer), and a central metadata registry (HydroCatalog). These components use WaterML as a transmission language for metadata and data. WaterML has recently been accepted as an international standard for time-series data by the Open Geospatial Consortium. HIS uses a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) like those mandated by US government agencies for distribution of government-collected data. The SOA provides an environment similar to search engines like Google, but specifically for water data sources. Access to over 95 hydrologic data sources including over 25 universities, state and provincial agencies, and multiple federal agencies with one catalog! 120
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We have made millions of measurements of the upper earths crust, from geologic bore holes, to seismic profiles, to aquifer pumping tests, to detailed soil surveys. This huge amount of information is lying around as maps and cross sections in the drawers and hard drives of geologic surveys of the states and many individual academic and private investigators. We dont even have continental-scale maps of the depth to the bedrocks which represents a fundamental boundary for many near surface processes such as weathering, shallow groundwater flow, and soil formation. Global soil maps exist but it does not go below ~1.5m depth. Can we integrate this vast amount of spatial data from all sources for the benefit of constructing a coherent, 3D description of crustal permeability of the land masses, so that we can begin to represent fluid flow in the subsurface in earth system models and elucidate its roles in the evolution of the earth system from the past to the present, and from the present to the future? We envision a 3-D geovolume for North America continent. It must have very fine spatial resolutions near the surface where great changes in space and time occur, with decreasing detail with depth. We envision the entire continental land masses represented as small cubes stacked together, each with different storage and permeability, through which fluid flow can be simulated. To build such a dataset is a huge challenge requiring the commitment of the entire community. But it can be done; similar effort has begun with the tectonics community [Hammer et al., 2011], and the seismology community (http://www.earthscope.org/home), the geochemistry community [Durr et al., 2005], and the EU-UNESCO hydrogeology community [Richts, 2009]. The Australian government has begun the Geofabric initiative to integrate existing river and aquifer information for continental-scale water cycle research (http://www.bom.gov.au/water/geofabric/index.shtml ).

Data Sources Available

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Map integrating NWIS, STORET, & Climatic Sites 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 0

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The Proposed CUAHSI Water Data Center

The CUAHSI HIS system has seen increasing adoption by the water science community over time, with 23 new services registered by data providers in 2012, and interest and cooperation from government agencies to make their data available through the system. With the development phase ended, CUAHSIs role as a community organization is to maintain and operate this system long term through a proposed Water Data Center. What is the Water Data Center? The proposed Water Data Center (WDC) will be a virtual deployment of CUAHSI HIS to the Microsoft Azure cloud and will include support personnel for software development, data curation, and user support.
The proposed center will take advantage of technological advances, such as cloud computing and ubiquitous web access, to fundamentally alter the way earth scientists conduct their research and educate the next generation of water scientists, and develop a more complete understanding of the Earth System through data. The WDC will: Interface with other data centers to make their data more accessible Rigorously curate the water data catalog, to ensure accuracy of records and existence of declared sources, and provide data backup and failover services for at risk data sources. Partner with researchers to extend the state of the art in water data use. Partner with industry to create plug-and-play data publishing from sensors, and to create domain-specific tools. Support ubiquitously accessible data discovery and access, web-based search and smartphone applications. Water Researchers (1)
Water Research Community (5)

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A services-oriented architecture enables customized data access clients. is HydroDesktop combines an open-source GIS package with a data discovery client that searches the HIS Central catalog for data by Geography (Bounding box or GIS Coverage) Time Property Measured Data Source GIS Coverages included with HydroDesktop download: Political Boundaries (Country, U.S. State, U.S. County) HUC8 Ability to delineate watersheds using EPA web services

The US Geologic Survey (USGS), in addition to its ground-breaking effort of the Regional Aquifer-Systems Analyses (RASA) three decades ago which resulted in the benchmark compilation of Groundwater Atlas of the United States (http://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha730/ch_a/index.html), has been engaged in an ambition to build the Global Crustal Database and Models (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/structure/crust/database.php). A possible prototype data model is that used by ArcHydro Groundwater. The EarthCube funded effort will look at defining needed capabilities and identifying data resources and gaps. A follow up effort jointly funded by the NSF and USGS through a Powell Center working group will begin assembling data over prototype regions and assess possible data models.

WDC Mission
Providing Production Quality Water Data Resources
The mission of the WDC will be to empower scientists to discover, use, store, and share water data by: providing simple and effective data discovery tools useful to researchers and educators in a variety of water-related disciplines providing simple and cost-effective data publication mechanisms for projects that do not desire to run their own data servers, and provide long term archiving of university research data providing educational and outreach resources that focus on data-driven and place-based learning working with government data providers and decision-makers to broker government data sources and to develop data standards to make more water data more easily accessible to the water research and education community. developing alternative data discovery interfaces such as web-based search clients and mobile applications that enhance the accessibility of water data by diverse audiences.

http://www.aquaveo.com/archydrogroundwater
Figure 1: a prototype faceted search web-based client that allows users to refine search results by specifying one facet of the metadata to filter at a time. The use of almost all metadata fields as search filters greatly speeds data discovery for specific geographic regions and quickly indicates the extent of data of interest.

These ideas will be explored further at our upcoming workshop (Jan 29-30)

EarthCube GEO Domain Workshop: Envisioning a Digital Crust for Simulating Continental Scale Subsurface Fluid Flow in Earth System Models
In order to advance the understanding of the critical zone and deeper crust and to better couple the exchange of mass and energy between the surface and the subsurface, this project will hold 3-day workshop to develop a long-term vision of a digital representation of the continental crust of N. America and design concepts for prototype data model(s). The digital catalog of crustal structure, composition and permeability (as well as parameters from which permeability could be inferred) define the mechanisms by which to integrate vast amounts of disparate data types and to construct a coherent, 3D picture of subsurface structure and material properties, so that we can begin to represent subsurface fluid flow in Earth system models and elucidate its critical controls in the evolution of the Earth system from the past to the present and the future.

Da D ta y er ov isc

Water Research Subscribers (2)

D at aM an Serv ageme nt ices

ucts ta Prod New Da rvices an d S e ay es, -Pl rfac s d n te n g-a In g-I Plu ent y Plu m r tru ove Ins Disc
CUAHSI Water Data Center

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Data Products, Software, Best Practices

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Sta Stand n a Wr dards rds a ap p - C o n d ers mp /Br lian oke t rs

Government Data Providers, Decision-Makers (7)

Community
Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI)
109 US University members 7 affiliate members 20 International affiliate members 3 corporate members (as of January 2013) This project serves the CUAHSI community, is responsive to needs identified in CUAHSI strategic plan, takes input from the CUAHSI Informatics standing committee and engages the community through CUAHSI outreach capability.

Supporting Informatics Research

An important function of the WDC will be to collaborate with researchers to create production quality resources resulting from research projects developed in the academic community. Such efforts are currently active, ongoing, and include the following: HydroShare - An Interactive Software Infrastructure for Sustaining Collaborative Community Innovation in the Hydrologic Sciences: HydroShare is a collaboration led by researchers at Utah State University, RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill, and CUAHSI. This project is developing sustainable cyberinfrastructure for better access to water-related data and models in the hydrologic sciences, enabling hydrologists and other associated communities to collaborate and combine data and models from multiple sources. For more, visit: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1148453 http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1148090

Integration with Modeling and Other EarthCube Efforts

Additional EarthCube and other efforts around building community data and modeling resources will be leveraged and coordinated with the data center, ongoing efforts to advance the digital crust (including a joint NSF-USGS funded Powell Synthesis Center working group that will work on prototyping after the EarthCube workshop) and other informatics projects.
New Partnerships with NCAR to bring the hydrologic modeling community into the full NCAR community model development cycle

http://www.cuahsi.org

Development of Community-Based Ontology and Standards for Hydrologic Data Discovery and Exchange: This project is developing a more comprehensive, extensible ontology that harmonizes the more generic information model contained within the existing HIS data model with those from various existing federal information sources. For more, visit: http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0949196

For example, other efforts, including an EarthCube EAGER grant, are exploring new visions for Earth System Models, working with CI and geoscience communities to define optimal pathways forward for coupling Earth System Model (ESM) components. The data services and resources being developed in various efforts all contribute to the overall vision of EarthCube.