TEEHR and CIROH Advance Cloud-Based Hydrologic Model Evaluation into a New Era
CIROH is advancing hydrologic model evaluation into a new era. Led by a core team of developers and scientists at RTI, with testing and contributions from others across the consortium, we've built TEEHR — a system purpose-built for evaluating models at scale. Combining novel approaches to data analytics with cutting-edge open data infrastructure, TEEHR enables a truly complete picture of model and forecast performance across datasets, sites, historical time periods, and forecast horizons.
Why do we need TEEHR?
TEEHR is built on a fundamental question: “Which hydrologic model is better?”. At its simplest, this can seem trivial; the model simulation is paired with observations, a few performance metrics are calculated, and you're on your way to a common performance analysis. Things can start to get more complicated if want to go larger, dig deeper or ask more nuanced questions:
- What if we want to compare many models against each other?
- What if we want to analyze thousands of locations with 40-years of hourly timestep data at the continental scale?
- What if we want to interrogate the data with questions like:
- “How does performance during high-flow events compare to low-flow events?”
- “How does model performance relate to physical basin attributes?”
- “What's the uncertainty associated with the resulting metrics?”
- What if we want to make the data easily accessible to the hydrologic community to support both historical and near-real time analyses?
These are the challenges TEEHR is designed to address.
