Interactive hydrological modelling and simulation on client-side web systems: an educational case study

Computational hydrological models and simulations are fundamental pieces of the workflow of contemporary hydroscience research, education, and professional engineering activities. In support of hydrological modelling efforts, web-enabled tools for data processing, storage, computation, and visualiza...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of hydroinformatics Vol. 24; no. 6; pp. 1194 - 1206
Main Authors Ewing, Gregory, Mantilla, Ricardo, Krajewski, Witold, Demir, Ibrahim
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London IWA Publishing 01.11.2022
Subjects
client-side simulation
Computation
Computer applications
Curricula
Data analysis
Data processing
Education
Engineering profession
Forecasting
Hydrologic models
hydrological modelling
Hydrology
JavaScript
Microprocessors
Modelling
Rainfall-runoff relationships
Sedimentation & deposition
Simulation
Software
Storage
Stream flow
Teaching
Tsunamis
Usability
User interface
Visualization
Watershed management
Watersheds
Web browsers
web-based simulation
Workflow
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Summary:Computational hydrological models and simulations are fundamental pieces of the workflow of contemporary hydroscience research, education, and professional engineering activities. In support of hydrological modelling efforts, web-enabled tools for data processing, storage, computation, and visualization have proliferated. Most of these efforts rely on server resources for computation and data tasks and client-side resources for visualization. However, continued advancements of in-browser, client-side compute performance present an opportunity to further leverage client-side resources. Towards this end, we present an operational rainfall-runoff model and simulation engine running entirely on the client side using the JavaScript programming language. To demonstrate potential uses, we also present an easy-to-use in-browser interface designed for hydroscience education. Although the use case presented here is self-contained, the core technologies can extend to leverage multi-core processing on single machines and parallelization capabilities of multiple clients or JavaScript-enabled servers. These possibilities suggest that client-side hydrological simulation can play a central role in a dynamic, interconnected ecosystem of web-ready hydrological tools.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Case Study-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
content type line 14
ObjectType-Report-1
ISSN:1464-7141
1465-1734
DOI:10.2166/hydro.2022.061