Community Workflows to Advance Reproducibility in Hydrologic Modeling: Separating model-agnostic and model-specific configuration steps in applications of large-domain hydrologic models
Wouter Knoben, Martyn Clark, Jerad Bales, Andrew Bennett, Shervan Gharari, Christopher B. Marsh, Bart Nijssen, Alain Pietroniro, Raymond J. Spiteri, David G. Tarboton, Andrew W. Wood, Guoqiang Tang
Abstract
Despite the proliferation of computer-based research on hydrology and water resources, such research is typically poorly reproducible. Published studies have low reproducibility because of both incomplete availability of the digital artifacts of research and a lack of documentation on workflow processes. This leads to a lack of transparency and efficiency because existing code can neither be checked nor re-used. Given the high-level commonalities between existing process-based hydrological models in terms of their input data and required pre-processing steps, more open sharing of code can lead to large efficiency gains for the modeling community. Here we present a model configuration workflow that provides full reproducibility of the resulting model instantiation in a way that separates the model-agnostic preprocessing of specific datasets from the model-specific requirements that specific models impose on their input files. We use this workflow to create both a continental and a local setup of the Structure for Unifying Multiple Modeling Alternatives (SUMMA) framework connected to the mizuRoute routing model. These examples show how a relatively complex model setup over a large domain can be organized in a reproducible and structured way that has the potential to accelerate hydrologic modeling for the community as a whole. We provide a tentative blueprint of how a community modeling paradigm can be built on top of workflows such as this. We term this initiative the “Community Workflows to Advance Reproducibility in Hydrologic Modeling’ (CWARHM; pronounced “swarm’).