Land use change web app for GSSHA models

Water resources decision makers often use hydrologic models to provide scientific insight on relevant issues. As decision makers they typically do not participate in developing a calibrated model, but rather inform their decisions by changing one or several variables and observing the result. This process is a sensitivity analysis or scenario exploration. In order to keep decision makers abstracted from the details of the model, there is a need to have an easy way for any user to change common variables in these simulations. One of the most common scenarios for spatially distributed hydrologic runoff models involves changing some part of the land use for a watershed. Land use changes relatively frequently due to urbanization or through seasonal causes and disasters such wild fires. In Gridded Surface and Subsurface Hydrologic Analysis (GSSHA) models, the land use is represented by a raster index map and a table of hydrologic parameters for each unique index. The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate a web application or app that has been developed to allow a user to quickly and easily change raster index maps (such as the land use map) for a GSSHA model. This app will allow any user, from decision-makers to homeowners, or researchers, to modify the index maps of an existing GSSHA model and run it in the cloud. The user can either change the land use and run one scenario, or continue making changes to see how the model reacts with various land use combinations. This app is an example of how cyber infrastructure can be used to simplify the scenario exploration experience by automating common tasks to overcome the technical hurdles that are usually required to make even simple changes to hydrologic models. The app was developed using a new hydrologic modeling app framework that is being developed at Brigham Young University as part of the CI-Water project. Acknowledgement: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1135482