Community Workflows to Advance Reproducibility in Hydrologic Modeling:
Separating model-agnostic and model-specific configuration steps in
applications of large-domain hydrologic models
Abstract
Despite the proliferation of computer-based research on hydrology and
water resources, such research is typically poorly reproducible.
Published studies have low reproducibility due to incomplete
availability of data and computer code, and a lack of documentation of
workflow processes. This leads to a lack of transparency and efficiency
because existing code can neither be quality controlled nor re-used.
Given the commonalities between existing process-based hydrological
models in terms of their required input data and preprocessing steps,
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 instantiations in a way that
separates the model-agnostic preprocessing of specific datasets from the
model-specific requirements that models impose on their input files. We
use this workflow to create large-domain (global, continental) and local
configurations of the Structure for Unifying Multiple Modeling
Alternatives (SUMMA) hydrologic model 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 advances in hydrologic modeling for the
community as a whole. We provide a tentative blueprint of how community
modeling initiatives can be built on top of workflows such as this. We
term our workflow the “Community Workflows to Advance Reproducibility
in Hydrologic Modeling’‘ (CWARHM; pronounced “swarm”).