WebHLM: A Client-Side Web Environment for Hydrologic Modelling and Education
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Computational hydrologic models and simulations are fundamental pieces of the workflow of contemporary hydroscience research and education. In support of hydrologic modeling efforts, web-enabled tools for data processing, storage, computation, and visualization have proliferated. Most of these efforts rely on server resources for computation and data tasks, and client machines’ resources for visualization. Yet, continued advancements of in-browser, client-side compute performance present an opportunity to leverage these resources. Towards this end, we present an operational hydrologic model within a simulation engine running entirely on client-side using the JavaScript programming language. Further, we present an easy-to-use, in-browser interface for the core simulation engine to support educational and outreach applications. Though the use case presented here is self-contained, the core technology of the simulation engine can extend to leverage multi-core processing on single machines and networking capabilities of multiple clients or JavaScript enabled servers. These possibilities suggest client-side hydrologic simulation can play a central role in a dynamic, interconnected ecosystem of web-ready hydrologic tools.