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HyDis: An Integrated Information System for Multi-Purpose User-Adaptive Access to Land Surface Hydrologic and Water Resources Data

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Earth observation by remote sensing has contributed significantly to the current state-of-the-art in understanding and modeling land-surface processes. Modern hydrologic and water resources studies require diverse data that include current and historical in-situ measurements as well as remotely sensed estimates of surface characteristics. Such data must be obtained from wide variety of distributed archives that are scattered among various agencies such as USGS, USDA, EPA, NOAA, NASA EOSDIS and DAACs. Modern hydrologic and water resource research scientists need access to widely distributed data, to perform transformations and manipulation of data to assemble in appropriate format, familiarization with varied format and structure of each provider, to perform pre-processing of data, and information about atmospheric and terrestrial components of earth system at several spatial and temporal resolutions. This project is part of the land-surface processes and hydro-climatology research initiative and is a collaborative effort between the Department of Management Information Systems and the Department of Hydrology and Water Resources at the University of Arizona, and USGS.

The objective of HyDis project is to make comprehensive hydrologic and water resources data products and services available to scientists and tailor information to user's needs . HyDis architecture consists of three components: Resource Discovery Module (RDM), which perform goal oriented discoveries and retrievals. Science Data Management Module (SDMM) which provides the means to account for the spatial relationships between various data products, and Distributed Digital Resources (DDR) which comprises existing and anticipated databases and algorithms. To fulfill its role as resource discovery, information management system, and product generation and delivery system, HyDis must be capable of successfully performing four main functions: understand the query of the user, locate the most suitable data sets, retrieve and subset the data, and reformat and present the data in a suitable format.

HyDis will make research quality hydrologic and water resources data available to research scientists, provide data tailored to individual needs of scientists and help develop information management framework that is adaptive to remote sensing products.

Sponsor: NASA

Please click HERE for a PowerPoint presentation of the project.

Please click HERE for a demonstration of the system.

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