WaterHUB: a resource for students and educators for learning hydrology

Abstract

The study of surface water hydrology involves understanding the occurrence, distribution and movement of water on the surface of the earth. Because of human impacts in the form of landuse change, the hydrologic processes at one geographic location may be different than other locations under same or different climatic settings. As a result, a tool that educators and students can use to explore hydrology through observed data and computational simulations is needed. The objective of this paper is to present a prototype model sharing and data exploration tool that can be used for education as well as for research. A GIS-enabled model sharing platform for Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), called SWATShare, is developed that enables students to not only run model simulations online, but also publish, share and visualize model results to study the impact of land use change on hydrology at watershed scale. SWATShare is developed as a part of the WaterHUB system that is built by combining Purdue's HUBzero technology and TeraGrid/XSEDE computation resources. Experience of developing and using SWATShare in a classroom will be presented and discussed. In addition, the development and implementation plan of another tool, called Hydrology Exploration Tool, will be presented.