Interactive hydrological modelling and simulation on client-side web systems: an educational case study. Issue 6 (2nd November 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ewing, Gregory; Mantilla, Ricardo; Krajewski, Witold; Demir, Ibrahim
• Is Part Of: Journal of hydroinformatics. Volume 24:Issue 6(2022)
• Page Start: 1194
• Page End: 1206
• Publication Date: 2022-11-02
• Subjects: client-side simulation -- hydrological modelling -- hydrology -- web-based simulation; Hydrology -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Geographic information systems -- Periodicals; Geographic information systems; Hydrology -- Data processing; Electronic journals; Periodicals; 551.480285
• DOI: 10.2166/hydro.2022.061
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1464-7141

Abstract

Abstract: 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'. Graphical Abstract