EarthSim: Flexible Environmental Simulation Workflows Entirely Within Jupyter Notebooks
Dharhas Pothina
Philipp J. F. Rudiger
James A Bednar
Scott Christensen
Kevin Winters
Kimberly Pevey
Christopher E. Ball
Gregory Brener
Video: https://youtu.be/KTbd_oUkP4Q
Abstract
Building environmental simulation workflows is typically a slow process involving multiple
proprietary desktop tools that do not interoperate well. In this work, we demonstrate building
flexible, lightweight workflows entirely in Jupyter notebooks. We demonstrate these capabilities
through examples in hydrology and hydrodynamics using the AdH (Adaptive Hydraulics) and
GSSHA (Gridded Surface Subsurface Hydrologic Analysis) simulators. The goal of this work is
to provide a set of tools that work well together and with the existing scientific python ecosystem,
that can be used in browser based environments and that can easily be reconfigured and repurposed
as needed to rapidly solve specific emerging issues such as hurricanes or dam failures.
As part of this work, extensive improvements were made to several general-purpose open source
packages, including support for annotating and editing plots and maps in Bokeh and HoloViews,
rendering large triangular meshes and regridding large raster data in HoloViews, GeoViews, and
Datashader, and widget libraries for Param. In addition, two new open source projects are being
released, one for triangular mesh generation (Filigree) and one for environmental data access (Quest).
python, visualization, workflows, environmental simulation, hydrology, hydrodynamics, grid generation
DOI10.25080/Majora-4af1f417-007