ADHydro: Up and Running

For Bob Steinke and the rest of the CI-WATER researchers working on a sophisticated water model called ADHydro, their hard work and dedication has culminated into the completion of the model.

“We have the code running, with groundwater, surface water, infiltration and channels, rivers, and lakes,” says Bob Steinke, a software engineer at the University of Wyoming. “It’s running, it’s not crashing, and we get results out, but now we have to make sure those results are right.”

ADHydro is a new hydrology model that will allow researchers in the field to better understand water processes, including how fast water soaks through the soil, how fast water flows over land, and more.

Now that ADHydro is running, researchers will continue to work on the model and build on it, making it faster and more powerful.

“The next step is really performance improvement,” says Bob. “We’ve got a lot of ways that we can improve the performance just in the serial code itself, and then we want to parallelize it so that it can run on the supercomputer and run faster.”

For the whole team working on ADHydro, getting it up and running is a huge success, and something they’re proud of.

“We’re happy with our progress,” Bob says. 

By Robin Rasmussen

CI-WATER Project Insights: ADHydro

When it comes to water management, knowing how water moves and where it ends up is crucial. That’s why a team of CI-WATER researchers are working on a new model, called ADHydro.

ADHydro will be the most robust model of its kind, presenting high-resolution detail for a broad geographical area. It will enable researchers to more accurately measure how fast water soaks through the soil, how fast the water flows over land and more. With these calculations, researchers can determine where the water goes and how it gets there.

“ADHydro is physics-based, meaning that it simulates specific physical processes as opposed to a curve-fitting model that can be calibrated to match historical data, but doesn’t simulate specific physics processes,” says Dr. Robert Steinke, a software engineer on the interdisciplinary team developing the model.

“It’s important to CI-WATER because one of the goals of CI-WATER is to allow watershed managers in the field access to high performance computing resources,” says Robert.

The ADHydro model is set for initial deployment next year. The completed model will give researchers the tools they need to study water movement in the field, ultimately helping water managers better understand this essential resource. 

By Robin E. Rasmussen