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...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
IWA Publishing
2022-11-01
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| Series: | Journal of Hydroinformatics |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://jhydro.iwaponline.com/content/24/6/1194 |
| 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.
HIGHLIGHTS
We present the Hillslope Link Model (HLM)-Web, a simulation engine for rainfall-runoff modelling in JavaScript.;
The simulation engine runs full-scale, physically based rainfall-runoff models.;
All computations are performed on the client side within the browser.;
HLM-Web is demonstrated with a use case for hydroscience education.;
The use case facilitates hydrological education and research ‘sandboxing’.; |
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| ISSN: | 1464-7141 1465-1734 |