A social media hub for hydrological data

USU's Dr. David Tarboton will lead a $4 million National Science Foundation-funded collaborative effort aimed at improving HydroShare - an online database system that simplifies the storage and sharing of hydrological data and models.

"Hydroshare is an online system for the scientific community that allows us to easily and freely share products from our research," said Tarboton, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and a leading hydrology expert who helped create HydroShare. "We're interested in sharing not just the scientific publication summarizing a study, but also the data and models used to create that study."

Tarboton says sharing scientific data helps researchers collaborate and improves the quality of data and scientific knowledge. Enhancing HydroShare's capabilities, he added, will help hydrologists and a broad community of earth-science researchers transform data sharing techniques and accelerate the pace of discovery. Improvements to HydroShare include enhancements to data sharing tools, and new features that enable its 1,000-plus users to develop their own unique apps to access HydroShare resources.

"HydroShare represents the latest thinking in collaborative hydrology research," said Tarboton. "This program and its improved capabilities will serve a diverse community of researchers ranging from hydrologists and environmental engineers to aquatic ecologists."

HydroShare will play an important role in understanding the devastating flooding events from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Tarboton and collaborators at The University of Texas at Austin will use HydroShare as a key resource for understanding how such large and sustained flooding and rainfall events could have occurred, and how critical infrastructures should be designed to better withstand extreme weather events.

Provided by Utah State University