pywatershed 0.2.1

pywatershed is a Python package for hydrologic modeling

pywatershed

Table of Contents

• Purpose
• Installation
• Contributing
• Example Notebooks
• Overview of Repository Contents
• Disclaimer

Purpose

The purpose of this repository is to refactor and redesign the PRMS modeling system while maintaining its functionality. Code modernization is a step towards unification with MODFLOW 6 (MF6).

The following motivations are taken from our AGU poster from December 2022 which provides additional details on motivations, project status, and current directions of this project as of approximately January 2023.

Goals of the USGS Enterprise Capacity (EC) project include:

• A sustainable integrated, hydrologic modeling framework for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
• Interoperable modeling across the USGS, partner agencies, and academia

Goals for EC Watershed Modeling:

• Couple the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS, e.g. Regan et al, 2018)  with MODFLOW 6 (MF6, e.g. Langevin et al, 2017) in a sustainable way
• Redesign PRMS to be more modern and flexible
• Prioritize process representations in the current National Hydrological Model (NHM) based on PRMS 5.2.1

Prototype an EC watershed model: "pywatershed"

• Redesign PRMS quickly in python
• Couple to MF6 via BMI/XMI interface (Hughes et al, 2021; Hutton et al, 2020)
• Establish a prototyping ground for EC codes that couples to the compiled framework: low cost proof of concepts (at the price of potentially less computational performance) * Enable process representation hypothesis testing
• Use cutting-edge techniques and technologies to improve models
• Machine learning, automatic differentiation
• Address challenges of modeling across space and time scales
• Transition prototype watershed model to compiled EC code

Installation

pywatershed uses Python 3.9 or 3.10.

The pywatershed package is available on PyPI but installation of dependencies may not be reliable on all platforms.

We recommend dependencies be first installed with Mamba. This will be much faster than Ananconda (but the conda command could also be used). We hope to provide pywatershed installation with all its dependencies on conda-forge in the near future.

If you wish to use the stable release, you will use main in place of <branch> in the following commands. If you want to follow developemnt, you'll use develop instead.

Without using git (directly), you may:

curl -L -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EC-USGS/pywatershed/<branch>/environment_w_jupyter.yml
mamba env create -f environment_w_jupyter.yml
conda activate pws
pip install git+https://github.com/EC-USGS/pywatershed.git@<branch>

Or to use git and to be able to develop:

git clone https://github.com/EC-USGS/pywatershed.git
cd pywatershed
mamba env create -f environment_w_jupyter.yml
activate pws
pip install -e .

(If you want to name the environment other than the default pws, use the command mamba env update --name your_env_name --file environment_w_jupyter.yml --prune you will also need to activate this environment by name.)

We install the environment_w_jupyter.yml to provide all known dependencies including those for running the eample notebooks. (The environment.yml does not contain jupyter or jupyterlab because this interferes with installation on WholeTale, see Example Notebooks seection below.)

Contributing

See the developer documentation for instructions on setting up a development environment. See the contribution guide to contribute to this project.

Example Notebooks

For introductory example notebooks, look in the examples/ directory in the repository. Numbered starting at 00, these are meant to be completed in order. Non-numbered notebooks coveradditional topics. These notebooks are note yet covered by testing and so may be expected to have some issues until they are added to testing. In examples/developer/ there are notebooks of interest to developers who may want to learn about running the software tests.

Though no notebook outputs are saved in Github, these notebooks can easily navigated to and run in WholeTale containers (free but sign-up or log-in required). This is a very easy and quick way to get started without needing to install pywatershed requirements yourself. WholeTale is an NSF funded project and supports logins from many institutions, e.g. the USGS, and you may not need to register.

There are containers for both the main and develop branches.

• WholeTale container for latest release (main branch)
• WholeTale container for develop branch

WholeTale will give you a jupyter-lab running in the root of this repository. You can navigate to examples/ and then open and run the notebooks of your choice. The develop container may require the user to update the repository (git pull origin) to stay current with development.

Overview of Repository Contents

The contents of directories at this level is described. Therein you may discover another README.md for more information.

.github/: Github actions, scripts and Python environments for continuous integration (CI) and releasing,
asv_benchmarks/: preformance benchmarking by ASV
autotest/: pywatershed package testing using pytest
autotest_exs/: pywatershed example notebook testing using pytest
bin/:PRMS executables distributed
doc/:Package/code documentation source code
evaluation/: tools for evaluation of pywatershed
examples/:How to use the package, mostly jupyter notebooks
prms_src/:PRMS source used for generating executables in bin/
pywatershed/:Package source
reference/:Ancillary materials for development
resources/:Static stuff like images
test_data/:Data used for automated testing

Disclaimer

This information is preliminary or provisional and is subject to revision. It is being provided to meet the need for timely best science. The information has not received final approval by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and is provided on the condition that neither the USGS nor the U.S. Government shall be held liable for any damages resulting from the authorized or unauthorized use of the information.

From: https://www2.usgs.gov/fsp/fsp_disclaimers.asp#5

This software is in the public domain because it contains materials that originally came from the U.S. Geological Survey, an agency of the United States Department of Interior. For more information, see the official USGS copyright policy

Although this software program has been used by the USGS, no warranty, expressed or implied, is made by the USGS or the U.S. Government as to the accuracy and functioning of the program and related program material nor shall the fact of distribution constitute any such warranty, and no responsibility is assumed by the USGS in connection therewith. This software is provided "AS IS."