NC State
MEAS Undergraduate Updates
Speaker –  Fred L. Ogden, Chief Scientist, NOAA-NWS Office of Water Prediction, Tuscaloosa, AL (hosted by R. Harmon).
Seminar Title – Next Generation Water Resources Modeling Framework: Opportunities for Community Involvement  Zoom
Abstract – Providing timely inland and coastal continental-scale hydrologic predictions requires modeling in a High Performance Computing environment. The current operational NOAA-NWS National Water Model applies a uniform formulation to make continental scale flow predictions on the NHD+ drainage network. However, scientific evaluations in the hydrologic community literature demonstrates that different model formulations for different hydrologic regions is likely to improve prediction skill given the spatial variability in dominant stormflow generation mechanisms and associated uncertainties in processes and parameters.
The variety of legacy water resources models have dissimilar inputs and setup workflows, run-time environments, discretizations, solvers, and required forcing data. The sheer variety of approaches impedes model comparison and interoperability. The WaterML 2.0 HY_FEATURES standard provides a stable meta-model to describe the hydrologic landscape, and includes four fundamental topological elements – “catchment”, “flowpath”, “water body”, and their “nexus” linkages, which represent internal boundary conditions and provide natural breakpoints between component models. This data model standard helps to unify model setup workflows.
The Next Generation Water Resources Modeling Framework currently under development by NOAA-NWS promotes interoperability, inter-comparison, model-based testing of research hypotheses, and ultimately improved agency-specific operational predictions while incorporating rapid adoption of advancements from the academic and federal research communities. This is achieved by using the drainage network as a graph to organize parallelization, and by extending the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (CSDMS) Basic Model Interface (BMI) to include state-serialization functionality and to accommodate models with parallel formulations. Work in progress uses the open source development paradigm and participation by the research community is welcomed. The Next
Generation National Water Model
 will represent a specific configuration of the Next Generation Water Resources Modeling Framework. Its model agnostic, open-source, standards-based design unifies model setup workflows, promotes model interoperability, and allows NOAA-NWS and other federal water modeling partners to engage with the research and academic communities to stop developing, and in many cases, reinventing, models while more rapidly advancing modeling for hydrologic prediction.
Bio – Fred L. Ogden came to NOAA from academia. He held tenured Civil Engineering faculty positions at the University of Connecticut (1994-2005) and the University of Wyoming (2006-2017) with expertise in hydrologic science and hydraulic engineering. Together with students and collaborators Dr. Ogden has developed several innovative hydrologic simulation models, including the Gridded

Surface/Subsurface Hydrologic Analysis model (GSSHA), and ADHydro, an
unstructured physics-based hydrologic simulator designed for supercomputing
applications. He also has extensive field and laboratory experience in physical
hydrology and hydraulics. Dr. Ogden led the team discovery of the Soil Moisture
Velocity Equation that replaces the computationally expensive 1-D Richardson/Richards’ partial differential equation with an accurate, reliable and
computationally efficient ordinary differential equation.