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Towards Reproducible Hydrological Modelling with eWaterCycle
  • +13
  • Niels Drost,
  • Jerom Aerts,
  • Fakhereh Alidoost,
  • Bouwe Andela,
  • Jaro Camphuijsen,
  • Yifat Dzigan,
  • Nick Van De Giesen,
  • Rolf Hut,
  • Eric Hutton,
  • Peter Kalverla,
  • Maarten van Meersbergen,
  • Gijs van den Oord,
  • Inti Pelupessy,
  • Stefan Verhoeven,
  • Berend Weel,
  • Ben van Werkhoven
Niels Drost
Netherlands eScience Center

Corresponding Author:n.drost@esciencecenter.nl

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Jerom Aerts
Delft University of Technology
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Fakhereh Alidoost
Netherlands eScience Center
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Bouwe Andela
Netherlands eScience Center
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Jaro Camphuijsen
Netherlands eScience Center
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Yifat Dzigan
Netherlands eScience Center
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Nick Van De Giesen
Delft University of Technology
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Rolf Hut
Delft University of Technology
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Eric Hutton
Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System
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Peter Kalverla
Netherlands eScience Center
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Maarten van Meersbergen
Netherlands eScience Center
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Gijs van den Oord
Netherlands eScience Center
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Inti Pelupessy
Netherlands eScience Center
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Stefan Verhoeven
Netherlands eScience Center
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Berend Weel
Netherlands eScience Center
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Ben van Werkhoven
Netherlands eScience Center
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Abstract

The eWaterCycle platform(https://www.ewatercycle.org/) is a fully Open Source system designed explicitly to advance the state of Open and FAIR Hydrological modelling. Reproducibility is a key ingredient of FAIR, and one of the driving principles of eWaterCycle. While working with Hydrologists to create a fully Open and FAIR comparison study, we noticed that many ad-hoc tools and scripts are used to create input (forcing, parameters) for a hydrological model from the source datasets such as climate reanalysis and land-use data. To make this part of the modelling process better reproducible and more transparent we have created a common forcing input processing pipeline based on an existing climate model analysis tool: ESMValTool (https://www.esmvaltool.org/). Using ESMValTool the eWaterCycle platform can perform commonly required pre-processing steps such as cropping, re-gridding, and variable derivation in a standardized manner. If needed, it also allows for custom steps for a Hydrological model. Our pre-processing pipeline directly supports commonly used datasets such as ERA-5, ERA-Interim, and CMIP climate model data, and creates ready-to-run forcing data for a number of Hydrological models. Besides creating forcing data, the eWaterCycle platform allows scientists to run Hydrological models in a standardized way using Jupyter notebooks, wrapping the models inside a container environment, and interfacing to these using BMI, the Basic Model Interface (https://bmi.readthedocs.io/). The container environment (based on Docker) stores the entire software stack, including the operating system and libraries, in such a way that a model run can be reproduced using an identical software environment on any other computer. The reproducible processing of forcing and a reproducible software environment are important steps towards our goal of fully reproducible, Open, and FAIR Hydrological modelling. Ultimately, we hope to make it possible to fully reproduce a Hydrological model experiment from data pre-processing to analysis, using only a few clicks.