An integrated computer modeling system for water resource management
Comprehensive system allows for more accurate predictions about shortages and flood and storm management
January 31, 2014
Water resource management involves numerous and often distinct areas, such as hydrology, engineering, economics, public policy, chemistry, ecology and agriculture, among others. It is a multi-disciplinary field, each with its own set of challenges and, in turn, its own set of computer models.
Jonathan Goodall's mission is "to take all these models from different groups and somehow glue them together," he says.
The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientist and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Virginia, is working to design an integrated computer modeling system that will seamlessly connect all the different models, enabling everyone involved in the water resources field to see the big picture.
"We are trying to computationally design models as components within a larger modeling framework so that we can integrate them," he says. "We want to be able to look at connections across the systems. For example, if you grow corn for ethanol for fuel, there are economic, water quality and agricultural aspects. How do you look at the issues and problems holistically? How do you look at all the components of the system and their interactions? We need to have this perspective if we want to understand all the consequences that happen to water, so we can manage it properly."
In doing so, "it will make the models we use to address water resources challenges more accurate and more robust," he says. "There are a lot of current water challenges that require sophisticated computational models."
Goodall lists, among others, the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, where fertilizer runoff has created dead zones; Southern California, which faces water shortages resulting from an over allocation of the Colorado River, and depleted groundwater resources; and floods along rivers in the Midwest, which prompted difficult decisions about releasing water through levies, and flooding lands, to avoid significant downstream flooding of cities, such as New Orleans.
"Models are used by water resource engineers every day to make predictions, such as when will a river crest following a heavy rain storm, or how long until a city's water supply runs dry during a period of drought," he adds. "One of the problems with our current models is that they often consider only isolated parts of the water cycle. Our work argues that when you look at all the pieces together, you will come up with a more comprehensive picture that will result in more accurate predictions."
His work was motivated and builds off an initiative funded by the European Union called Open Modeling Interface, known as OpenMI, originally conceived to facilitate the simulation of interacting processes, particularly environmental ones, by enabling independent computer models to exchange data as they ran.
Later, it became a generic solution to the problem of data exchange among any models, not just environmental, and soon after, not just models but software components, thereby connecting any combination of models, databases and analytical and visualization tools.
"We are trying to advance the software that bridges all the models," Goodall says. "One of the ways we are trying to strengthen the software is by trying to understand which kinds of problems it can handle."
For example, one challenge with bridging models of different systems is that one system might be more dynamic than another. In water resources, water movement in the atmosphere is more dynamic than water movement in deep aquifers.
"When the models are bridged, you need to allow for the flexibility that allows for these differences, otherwise you may run into significant computationally inefficiencies," Goodall says.
"Also, you can quickly get into semantics problems, where different models have different vocabularies in their internal systems," he adds. "You may need to have a variable passed be