Authors: Daniel P. Ames, Kel Markert, Gui da Silva – Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah
Title: Channelling the Data Deluge – A New CIROH API for Near-Instant Access to Any Historical NWM Streamflow Forecast.
Abstract: We worked with Google to develop an automated cloud workflow to move the historic and current NWM streamflow forecasts from their NetCDF archive into a dynamic, SQL-Queryable tabular format in Google Big Query. Google has released the new dataset as a public dataset so that anyone with a Google Cloud account can query the database, thereby quickly and painlessly retrieving historical short- medium- and long-range forecasts issued by the NWM in the past. This capability is expected to help enable and thereby speed up research on the NWM, including validation efforts, bias correction efforts, and planning and management efforts using the forecasts. We also built a REST based API that can be accessed through code to run common queries on the dataset and return the results to the user in a computationally fast and friendly manner. A forthcoming implementation of the API in the CIROH cloud will enable all CIROH members and researchers to use the API to retrieve forecasts for their researrch.