Anthony Castronova

• PhD
• Researcher at Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc

Recent decades have witnessed a massive increase in the volume and quality of hydrologic data available to aid water resources decision makers, managers, and scientists. This has been accompanied by exponential growth in both desktop and cloud computing, as well as data storage capabilities. As a result, there are abundant opportunities to drastica...

Creating online data repositories that follow Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles has been a significant focus in the research community to address the reproducibility crisis facing many computational fields, including environmental modeling. However, less work has focused on another reproducibility challenge: captur...

Data sharing benefits the researcher, the scientific community, and the public by allowing the impact of data to be generalized beyond one project and by making science more transparent. However, many scientific communities have not developed protocols or standards for publishing, citing, and versioning datasets. One community that lags in data man...

To further improve the reproducibility of work published in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, narrow the gap between research and practice, and promote reproducibility as a moral and ethical imperative in our practice of science and engineering, the editorial board now encourages authors to add a “Reproducible Results” section...

To further improve the reproducibility of work published in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, narrow the gap between research and practice, and promote reproducibility as a moral and ethical imperative in our practice of science and engineering, the editorial board now encourages authors to add a “Reproducible Results” section...

Cyberinfrastructure needs to be advanced to enable open and reproducible environmental modeling research. Recent efforts toward this goal have focused on advancing online repositories for data and model sharing, online computational environments along with containerization technology and notebooks for capturing reproducible computational studies, a...

CyberGIS-Jupyter is a cyberGIS framework for achieving data-intensive, reproducible, and scalable geospatial analytics using Jupyter Notebook based on advanced cyberinfrastructure. As a cutting-edge hydrological modeling framework, the Structure for Unifying Multiple Modeling Alternative (SUMMA) functions as a unified approach to process-based mode...

Land use planners, landscape architects, and water resource managers are using Green Infrastructure (GI) designs in urban environments to promote ecosystem services including mitigation of storm water flooding and water quality degradation. An expanded set of urban sustainability goals also includes increasing carbon sequestration, songbird habitat...

Environmental modelers rely on a variety of computational models to make predictions, test hypotheses, and address specific problems related to environmental science and natural resource management. Scientists and engineers must devote significant effort to preparing these computational models. While significant attention has been devoted to sharin...

HydroShare is an online repository tailored for the hydrology community and designed to facilitate collaboration and open sharing of hydrologic data, analytical tools, and models to enable model reuse, and research reproducibility. In HydroShare data, models and their input and output files are considered as objects of collaboration, or social obje...

Many hydrologists devote a significant amount of time to applying computational models. Sharing the results of these efforts broadly would benefit the community because scientists could, when appropriate, verify, extend, and refine existing models created by others rather than creating new models from scratch. While recent attention has been devote...

HydroShare is a web-based system funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for sharing hydrologic data and models as resources. Resources in HydroShare can either be assigned a generic type, meaning the resource only has Dublin Core metadata properties, or one of a growing number of specific resource types with enhanced metadata profiles defi...

Watershed delineation is a process to compute the drainage area for a point on the land surface, which is a critical step in hydrologic and water resources analysis. However , existing watershed delineation tools are still insufficient to support hydrologists and watershed researchers due to the lack of essential capabilities such as fully leveragi...

The types of data and models used within the hydrologic science community are diverse. New repositories have succeeded in making data and models more accessible, but are, in most cases, limited to particular types or classes of data or models and also lack the type of collaborative and iterative functionality needed to enable shared data collection...

A large variety of water models exist, each tailored to address specific challenges related to hydrologic science and water resources management. When scientists and engineers apply one of these models to address a specific question, they must devote significant effort to set up, calibrate, and evaluate that model instance built for some place and...

This paper evaluates a recently created Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) calibration tool built using the Windows Azure Cloud environment and a parallel version of the Dynamically Dimensioned Search (DDS) calibration method modified to run in Azure. The calibration tool was tested for six model scenarios constructed for three watersheds of inc...

Watershed delineation is a process for defining a land area that contributes surface water flow to a single outlet point. It is a commonly used in water resources analysis to define the domain in which hydrologic process calculations are applied. There has been a growing effort over the past decade to improve surface elevation measurements in the U...

HydroShare is an online, open-source, collaborative system being developed for sharing hydrologic data and models as part of the NSF’s Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program. The goal of HydroShare is to enable scientists to easily discover and access hydrologic data and models, retrieve them to their desktop, or perform ana...

Computer models are widely used in hydrology and water resources management. A large variety of models exist, each tailored to address specific challenges related to hydrologic science and water resources management. When scientists and engineers apply one of these models to address a specific question, they must devote significant effort to set up...

This paper explores service-oriented architectures as an approach for simulating integrated urban infrastructure as a system of systems. Models representing three individual infrastructure systems (water, transportation, and structures) are written as web services so that they can be linked through the exchange of data into an integrated system. An...

Environmental modeling often requires the use of multiple data sources, models, and analysis routines coupled into a workflow to answer a research question. Coupling these computational resources can be accomplished using various tools, each requiring the developer to follow a specific protocol to ensure that components are linkable. Despite these...

This paper presents a prototype software system for integrated environmental modeling that provides interoperability between the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS) and the Open Modeling Interface (OpenMI). The primary motivation for making these two systems interop...

To enhance accountability and collaboration, it is important to be able to share not only the results of a study, but also the analysis procedure and input data used to derive the results. This paper describes how HydroDesktop can be used to share data and analyses associated with water observations data. HydroDesktop is a free and open source desk...

Complicated research and management questions regarding watershed systems often require the use of more than one simulation model. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a means to integrate multiple simulation models to predict holistic system response. In this paper we explore the use of a component-based approach for the runtime integration of mo...

1] In component-based modeling, a complex system is represented as a series of loosely integrated components with defined interfaces and data exchanges that allow the components to be coupled together through shared boundary conditions. Although the component-based paradigm is commonly used in software engineering, it has only recently been applied...

Interdisciplinary research often requires the use of multiple data sources, models, and analysis routines coupled together in a workflow to answer a single research question. Coupling these computational resources into a workflow can be accomplished using various tools, but each of these tools requires the developer to follow a specific interface p...

Service-oriented computing is a software engineering paradigm that views complex software systems as an interconnected collection of distributed computational components. Each component has a defined web service interface that allows it to be loosely-coupled with client applications. The service-oriented paradigm presents an attractive way of model...

Component-based modeling offers an attractive approach for constructing next generation watershed models. In component-based modeling, a complex system is represented as a series of loosely-integrated components with defined interfaces and data exchanges. Because components are loosely-integrated, it is possible for modelers to change how component...

Component software architectures offer an alternative approach for building large, complex hydrologic modeling systems. In contrast to more traditional software paradigms (i.e. procedural or object-oriented approaches), using component-based approaches allows individuals to construct autonomous modeling units that can be linked together through sha...

Modeling complicated hydrologic systems often requires the integration of disparate data and models. The CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System targets the problem of integrating data by using a service-oriented architecture and data exchange standards to make heterogeneous databases appear to an end user as a single data resource. Similar integratio...

Loosely coupled modeling architectures enable model developers to represent an environmental system by incorporating processes from multiple scientific disciplines. In contrast, models developed using the more common tightly coupled architecture approach maximize computational performance, but are more restrictive in how they allow modelers to inco...

Component based architectures offer an alternative approach for building large, complex hydrologic modeling systems. In contrast to more traditional coding structures (i.e. sequential and modular modeling approaches), component-based modeling allows individuals to construct autonomous computational units that can be linked together through the exch...

Modeling frameworks provide the ability to create open, flexible modeling systems where simulations can be constructed from a set of computational modules interlinked for a given application. Various modeling frameworks have been proposed and developed with varying degrees of success. This paper investigates a more recent modeling framework, the Op...