Daniel P Ames

Brigham Young University - Provo Main Campus | BYU · Department of Civil and Construction Engineering

HydroShare is an online, collaborative system being developed for open sharing of hydrologic data and models. The goal of HydroShare is to enable hydrology researchers to easily discover and access hydrologic data and models, retrieve them to their desktop for local analysis and perform analyses in a distributed computing environment that may inclu...

Digital elevation models (DEMs) are a useful data source for the automatic delineation of flow paths, sub watersheds and flow networks for hydrologic modeling. Digital representation of the flow network is central to distributed hydrologic models because it encodes the model element linkages through which flow is routed to the outlet. The scale (dr...

Watershed management requires holistic, inclusive analyses of decisions and their potential impacts. This can be difficult for many reasons. In most cases, a wide variety of stakeholders with competing interests need to be included in the decision-making process and have their interests fairly represented. Relationships between variables of interes...

Groundwater modeling is a useful tool for assessing sustainability in water resources planning. However, groundwater models are difficult to construct in regions with limited data availability, areas where planning is most crucial. We illustrate how remote sensing data can be used with limited in situ data to build and calibrate a regional groundwa...

Groundwater modeling is a useful tool for assessing sustainability in water resources planning. However, groundwater models are difficult to construct in regions with limited data availability. We illustrated how remote sensing data can be used leverage limited in situ data to build and calibrate a regional groundwater model in the Goulbi Maradi al...

Earth system modelling (ESM) is essential for understanding past, present and future Earth processes. Deep learning (DL), with the data-driven strength of neural networks, has promise for improving ESM by exploiting information from Big Data. Yet existing hybrid ESMs largely have deep neural networks incorporated only during the initial stage of mo...

Obtaining and managing groundwater data is difficult as it is common for time series datasets representing groundwater levels at wells to have large gaps of missing data. To address this issue, many methods have been developed to infill or impute the missing data. We present a method for improving data imputation through an iterative refinement mod...

Multidimensional, georeferenced data are used extensively in hydrology, meteorology, and water science and engineering. These data are produced, shared, and used by diverse organizations globally. Conventions have been developed to standardize the metadata and format of these datasets to ensure compatibility with current and future software and web...

Geographic simulation models can be used to explore and better understand the geographical environment. Recent advances in geographic and socio-environmental research have led to a dramatic increase in the number of models used for this purpose. Some model repositories provide opportunities for users to explore and apply models, but few provide a g...

Most people face some level of water insecurity. Wise water management practices to address water security issues typically require data derived from a combination of observation and model data. This data has historically proven difficult to sustainably supply in many areas of the world. We present the design and development of a global, modeled st...

Accurate characterization of groundwater resources is required for sustainable management. Due to the cost of installing monitoring wells and challenges in collecting and managing in situ data, groundwater data are sparse—especially in developing countries. In this study, we demonstrate an analysis of long-term groundwater storage changes using tem...

Various problems are occurring and evolving in the earth’s environment, for example, global warming, air/water/soil pollution, floods, traffic congestion, and so forth. Moreover, decision-making and planning demands in industry and governance areas are also dependent on reasonable understandings of the environment. Geographic modelling (can also be...

Hydrologic modeling is trending toward larger spatial and temporal domains, higher resolutions, and less extensive local calibration and validation. Thorough calibration and validation are difficult because the quantity of observations needed for such scales do not exist or is inaccessible to modelers. We present the Stream Analysis for Bias Estima...

Portability of web applications between web servers of different organizations can be challenging and can complicate sharing and collaborative use of such tools. Given the distributed nature of the web, this lack of portability is usually not a concern because a user in one organization can link to and use a web application hosted by another organi...

Since 2002, National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) allows scientists of various disciplines to analyze and map changes in total water storage globally. Although the raw data are available to the public, the process of viewing, manipulating, and analyzing GRACE data can be difficult for those...

Owing to the heterogeneity of geo-analysis models, many scholars and researchers have designed and promulgated standards in an attempt to address this. However, models based on different standards still cannot be shared and reused easily among different model frameworks. For example, models based on the OpenMI, BMI and OpenGMS-IS standards have het...

Scientific datasets from global-scale earth science models and remote sensing instruments are becoming available at greater spatial and temporal resolutions with shorter lag times. Water data are frequently stored as multidimensional arrays, also called gridded or raster data, and span two or three spatial dimensions, the time dimension, and other...

We present the design and development of an open-source web application called Water Data Explorer (WDE), designed to retrieve water resources observation and model data from data catalogs that follow the WaterOneFlow and WaterML Service-Oriented Architecture standards. WDE is a fully customizable web application built using the Tethys Platform dev...

Water quality data collection, storage, and access is a difficult task and significant work has gone into methods to store and disseminate these data. We present a tool to disseminate research in a simple method that does not replace but extends and leverages these tools. The tool is not geo-graphically limited and works with any spatially-referenc...

Within the field of environmental and hydrologic modelling, there is a growing recognition of the scientific and educational value of sharing both model programs (i.e. the codes that formulate a model) and model instances (i.e. specific input files and model parameterizations). Indeed, numerous cyberinfrastructure tools have been created in recent...

As researchers globally work towards a fully digital representation of the earth and its processes – i.e. a true Digital Earth – the need grows for software and systems to link disparate computer simulation models of various parts of the earth in a reliable and highly functional way. Web services have been demonstrated as an effective way to share...

We present the development and testing of a web application called the historical validation tool (HVT) that processes and visualizes observed and simulated historical stream discharge data from the global GEOGloWS ECMWF streamflow services (GESS), performs seasonally adjusted bias correction, computes goodness-of-fit metrics, and performs forward...

A robust, extensible architecture is critical to open source projects that have a distributed developer and user base. The MapWindow 6.0 project is using a new architectural paradigm where extensibility is handled from several different plug-in points, rather than a single , application wide design. This allows new kinds of extensibility to be expl...

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...

Decision makers need an accurate understanding of aquifer storage trends to effectively manage groundwater resources. Groundwater is difficult to monitor and quantify since the data collected from monitoring wells are often available only at irregular and infrequent intervals. We present an open-source web application (app) to visualize groundwater...

Groundwater resources are expensive to develop and use; they are difficult to monitor and data collected from monitoring wells are often sporadic, often only available at irregular, infrequent, or brief intervals. Groundwater managers require an accurate understanding of historic groundwater storage trends to effectively manage groundwater resource...

Integrated geographic modelling and simulation is a computational means to improve understanding of the environment. With the development of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and web technologies, it is possible to conduct open, extensible integrated geographic modelling across a network in which resources can be accessed and integrated, and furt...

The Sharing of water data across disparate computer hardware and software platforms is facilitated by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) Hydrological Information System (HIS) and similar open and closed source systems. CUAHSI’s WaterOneFlow (WoF) and WaterML 1.1 web services and data encoding sta...

Tethys Platform is an open source framework for developing web-based applications for Earth Observation data. Our experience shows that Tethys significantly lowers the barrier for cloud-based app development, simplifies the process of accessing scalable distributed cloud computing resources and leverages additional software for data and computation...

Hydrologic modeling can be used to aid in decision-making at the local scale. Developed countries usually have their own hydrologic models; however, developing countries often have limited hydrologic modeling capabilities due to factors such as the maintenance, computational costs, and technical capacity needed to run models. A global streamflow pr...

Global or national scale flood early warning systems (FEWS) can benefit developing countries and ungauged regions that lack observational data, computational infrastructure, and/or the human capacity for streamflow modelling. Existing land surface models (LSM) typically generate forecasts using coarse resolution grid cells which, at least for strea...

Error metrics quantify predicted flow accuracy and compare different predictions. Hydrologists commonly use and report metrics with little justification or discussion of the selected metric or metric strengths and weaknesses. Metric selection requires clear objectives, as different metrics are sensitive to different bias or error types. We review o...

Environmental modelling is transitioning from the traditional paradigm that focuses on the model and its quantitative performance to a more holistic paradigm that recognises successful model-based outcomes are closely tied to undertaking modelling as a social process, not just as a technical procedure. This paper redefines evaluation as a multi-dim...

The effectiveness of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) modeling hinges on the quality of practices employed through the process, starting from early problem definition all the way through to using the model in a way that serves its intended purpose. The adoption and implementation of effective modeling practices need to be guided by a pra...

Hydrologists use a number of tools to compare model results to observed flows. These include tools to pre-process the data, data frames to store and access data, visualization and plotting routines, error metrics for single realizations, and ensemble metrics for stochastic realizations to calibrate and evaluate hydrologic models. We present an open...

Geoanalysis models are an abstraction and expression of geographic phenomena and processes which are associated to environmental issues. Such models continue to be created in many different domains, and collaborative modeling and simulation using models in the open web environment is becoming popular for geographic and environmental research. Servi...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is the primary U.S. Government agency for water data collection and dissemination. In this role, the USGS has recently created and deployed a National Water Census Data Portal (NWC-DP) which provides access to streamflow, evapotransporation, precipitation, aquatic biology and other data at the national level. Recog...

Hydrologic modeling can be used to provide warnings before, and to support operations during and after floods. Recent technological advances have increased our ability to create hydrologic models over large areas. In the United States (U.S.), a new National Water Model (NWM) that generates hydrologic variables at a national scale was released in Au...

Hydrologic modeling can help us understand how to better respond to extreme hydrologic events. Communicating model results to different groups has been a recurring challenge due to the evolving nature of hydrologic models and the distinct needs of different groups. A new National Water Model (NWM) was released in 2016 by NOAA's Office of Water Pred...

Cloud-based data management systems are more conducive to collaborative efforts when they are integrated with cloud-computing tools that interact with their stored data. HydroShare, a web based data management system for climate and water data, has implemented an Application Programming Interface and a web application platform deployed using Tethys...

The processes involved in bed-load sediment transport are complex and difficult to quantify. Field measurements provide insight and a chance to improve predictive methods. A comprehensive database is described that contains more than 15,000 observations from nearly 500 data sets of bed-load sediment transport. Observations are compiled from publish...

Applying modern software engineering to scientific software development has many challenges. These include lack of time or incentives to learn software engineering best practices, a lack of understanding or appreciation of the value of modern software engineering, and a shortage of mechanisms to more broadly change the software engineering culture...

Every year, the Editors of Environmental Modelling and Software select ten outstanding reviewers who have provided exceptional contributions to the journal. These ‘Outstanding Reviewer Award’ recipients are shortlisted by the Editors based on the rigor, constructiveness and timeliness of their reviews in addition to the number of reviews performed.

Abstract HydroShare is an online collaborative system under development to support the open sharing of hydrologic data, analytical tools, and computer models. With HydroShare, scientists can easily discover, access, and analyze hydrologic data and thereby enhance the production and reproducibility of hydrologic scientific results. HydroShare also t...

Watershed-scale hydrologic simulation models generally require climate data inputs including precipitation and temperature. These climate inputs can be derived from downscaled global climate simulations which have the potential to drive runoff forecasts at the scale of local watersheds. While a simulation designed to drive a local watershed model w...

Warning systems with the ability to predict floods several days in advance have the potential to benefit tens of millions of people. Accordingly, large-scale streamflow prediction systems such as the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service or the Global Flood Awareness System are limited to coarse resolutions. This article presents a method for rout...

An indoor experiment was conducted to analyze the movement characteristics of different sized droplets and their influence on water application rate distribution and kinetic energy distribution. Radial droplets emitted from a Nelson D3000 sprinkler nozzle under 66.3, 84.8, and 103.3 kPa were measured in terms of droplet velocity, landing angle, and...

The probability of the presence of snow cover at a given location over time is a critical input to hydrologic simulation models in snowpack-driven watersheds. While a number of open access web mapping tile services exist for viewing images of current and historical snow cover over large regions, no equally accessible tools exist for extracting nume...

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc. (CUAHSI) hydrologic information system (HIS) is a widely used service oriented system for time series data management. While this system is intended to empower the hydrologic sciences community with better data storage and distribution, it lacks support for the kind of 'W...

A brief summary of three key developments in water resources data sharing. Published in Water Resources IMPACT of the American Water Resources Association.

Determining socially acceptable and economically viable locations for utility-scale solar projects is a costly process that depends on many technical, economic, environmental and social factors. This paper presents a GIS-based multi-criteria solar project siting study conducted in the southwestern United States with a unique social preference compo...

Livestock guardian dogs (LGD) are one of the most effective methods available to reduce depredation on livestock. The purpose of this study was to determine if the presence of LGD changes grazing behavior of domestic sheep in an environment where predators are common. Western white-face ewes (n = 560) with attending lambs were used. Ewes were 32 d...

Water resources web applications or “web apps” are growing in popularity as a means to overcome many of the challenges associated with hydrologic simulations in decision-making. Water resources web apps fall outside of the capabilities of standard web development software, because of their spatial data components. These spatial data needs can be ad...

We present the design and development of a new WaterML R package that provides access to the Consortium of Universities for Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS) HydroServer as a means for storing and managing data. The new WaterML R package is presented in terms of its functional requirements and design, wi...

Estimation of spatial random fields (SRFs) is required for predicting groundwater flow, subsurface contaminant movement, and other areas of environmental and earth sciences modeling. This paper presents an inverse modeling framework called MAD# for characterizing SRFs, which is an implementation of the Bayesian inverse modeling technique Method of...