Channeling the water data deluge: a system for flexible integration and analysis of hydrologic data |
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| Authors: | Michael P McGuire Martin C Roberge Jie Lian |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA;2. Department of Geography and Environmental Planning, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA |
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| Abstract: | The hydrologic cycle and understanding the relationship between rainfall and runoff is an important component of earth system science, sustainable development, and natural disasters caused by floods. With this in mind, the integration of digital earth data for hydrologic sciences is an important area of research. Currently, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to perform hydrologic analysis at a large scale because the data to support such analyses are not available on a single system in an integrated format that can be easily manipulated. Furthermore, the state-of-the-art in hydrologic data integration typically uses a rigid relational database making it difficult to redesign the data model to incorporate new data types. The HydroCloud system incorporates a flexible document data model to integrate precipitation and stream flow data across spatial and temporal dimensions for large-scale hydrologic analyses. In this paper, a document database schema is presented to store the integrated data-set along with analysis tools such as web services for data access and a web interface for exploratory data analysis. The utility of the system is demonstrated based on a scientific workflow that uses the system for both exploratory data analysis and statistical hypothesis testing. |
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| Keywords: | hydrology data integration cloud-based systems NoSQL NEXRAD precipitation stream flow |
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