Collaborations

Following are our current active collaborations using OMS and its CSIP cloud services platform.

Environmental Resource Assessment and Management System (eRAMS)

eRAMS is both an application for subscribers and geospatial platform for application development.  Built by the CSU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, supported by the Integrated Decision Support (IDS) Group, the application provides users a collaborative geospatial platform for environmental risk assessment and resource analysis.  The application contains basic geospatial tools and social media features and runs irrigation and streamflow analysis tools.   Underlying model and computational services are deployed to the OMS/CSIP platform.  Many of the OMS/CSIP model and data services developed for other projects will be made available in eRAMS as well to support other customer segments. eRAMS currently provides the following applications on a production platform:

Comprehensive Flow Analysis

Irrigation Scheduler

Water Balance Modeling with Isotopes

The AgES-Watershed Model for Wide-Area Resource Analysis and Planning

The USDA-ARS Agricultural Systems Research Unit, assisted by the CSU OMS Team, is working on their fully distributed Agro-EcoSystem Watershed (AgES-Watershed) model that incorporates new and contemporary science for wide-area resource analysis and planning.  The new model contains more than 125 OMS components computing output for several resource concerns:  erosion, sedimentation, pesticide fate and transport, crop/plant growth, nutrient fate and transport, soil organic matter, and water infiltration and runoff.  The model features improved hydrologic unit topology.

Integrated Erosion Tool (IET)

The USDA-NRCS Information Technology Center (ITC) supported by the OMS Team is building an extension to the agency Customer Service Toolkit (CST) to calculate representative water and wind erosion rates, as well as soil condition indices for benchmark and planned conditions on land units in conservation plans.  The application runs against OMS Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE2) and Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS) model services deployed to the CSIP platform.  The application and model services access data from the OMS/CSIP soil data, climate, and land management operations data marts.  IET integrates with the ArcMap component of CST.  Capacity planning expects about 50,000 service requests per work day.

Model and Data Service Support to the Conservation Delivery Streamlining Initiative (CDSI)

The USDA-NRCS-ITC supported by the OMS Team, continues to develop science model and data services for the agency’s next generation web-based application system for 3,000 county level and technical support offices.  This work is part of the agency’s Conservation Delivery Streamlining Initiative (CDSI).  Model and data services have been developed for analyzing sheet/rill and wind erosion, and soil organic matter depletion at the farm/field scale and national soil, climate, and land management operation data marts.  These OMS services are deployed to the cloud services platform to scale under heavy user load, for example during conservation program sign-ups.  Work is underway to develop additional OMS model and services to support analysis of nutrients, organic pollutant, and pesticides in surface and groundwater, sedimentation, animal-forage balance, and greenhouse gas emissions.  During a typical work day, 4-5 thousand NRCS field conservationists and conservation district employees use the system to assist the conservation planning workflow, from inventory, analysis, through development of conservation solutions addressing identified resource concerns.  The system contains about 2 million conservation plans on roughly 300 million acres.

Water Supply Forecasting for the Western United States

The USDA-NRCS National Water and Climate Center (NWCC), supported by Portland State University and the CSU OMS team, is building the next generation water supply forecasting system for 600 basins in the western United States.  The system is based on an OMS implementation of the US Geological Survey Precipitation and Runoff  Model (PRMS) developed by Dr. George Leavesley, involving a workflow that includes:

1. Retrieval of data from SNOTEL, ACIS, and MET data stores
2. Input data processing using XYZ Distribution and Detrended Krigiing methods
3. OMS model simulation to compute regression coefficients for debiasing forecasts
4. OMS model simulation to produce twice-monthly raw forecasts
5. Post-processing to produce de-biased forecasts
6. Creation of forecast products

The system was activated for selected basins during the 2013 and 2014 forecast season.  The eRAMS geospatial platform was used to build a web application that steps the forecaster through the workflow, including visualization and analysis components.  Pending roll-out resources, the new system will be expanded to include 600 basins.  Load testing on the OMS cloud services platform has demonstrated reduced processing time from hours to a few minutes.

The JGRASS/NewAge Model for Hydrologic Modeling

The University of Trento (Italy) has built the semi-distributed hydrological modeling system JGrass-NewAge using the OMS3 component-based platform.  The model focuses on the hydrological budgets of medium scale to large scale basins as the product of the processes at the hillslope scale with the interplay of the river network. Key parts of the modeling system include (i) estimation of the space-time structure of precipitation, (ii) estimation of runoff production; (iii) aggregation and propagation of flows in channel; (v) estimation of evapotranspiration; (vi) automatic calibration of the discharge with the method of particle swarming.  The model grew from a project with the Adige River Basin Authority in northeastern Italy.  The model is integrated with the JGRASS UDig geospatial toolbox.

Monthly Water Balance Modeling with Isotopes in the Nile Basin

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supported by the OMS Team is building a monthly water balance modeling application that integrates isotope hydrology with traditional water balance methods.   The model, deployed as an OMS/CSIP service, and called IWBMIso, integrates components of the McCabe monthly water balance model, an isotope water balance model, daily Precipitation and Runoff Model (PRMS), and an isotope-enabled lake model to provide a more comprehensive accounting of water storages and fluxes above and below ground in a basin or watershed.  The application leverages the eRAMS collaborative geospatial platform.  The model runs using available global data for climate, soil, vegetation, and isotopes.  Although currently focused on analysis in the Nile Basin, the application is expected to be used world-wide.

Keystone Center Field to Market Initiative

The Keystone Center and agribusiness partnership, supported by ZedX, Inc. and the OMS team, have deployed an on-line Fieldprint Calculator application as part of the Field to Market Initiative.  The application enables farmers to document their production of crops in a sustainable manner.  It runs the water and wind erosion model services deployed to the OMS/CSIP platform.

Root Zone Water Quality Model (RZWQM) Model Service

The USDA-ARS-ASRU supported by the OMS Team are deploying RZWQM as an OMS/CSIP model service, responding to interest in conducting groundwater vulnerability assessments for pesticides and nutrients.

NRCS Hydro Tools

The USDA-ARS-ASRU supported by the OMS Team have re-deployed the NRCS TR-20 and TR-55 hydrology stand alone applications as OMS/CSIP computational web services.  These services support the NRCS CDSI strategy to integrate more science into their corporate business applications, deployed to a data center to assure consistent use across applications.

Land-Use and Agricultural Practices Web Service (LAMPS)

The USDA-ARS-ASRU supported by the OMS Team have developed an OMS/CSIP web service that accesses the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) Cropscape data store, derives crop history for a land unit, and from the OMS/CSIP Land Management Operations data mart constructs a crop rotation containing operations, which can be further refined by the user.  This data provisioning tool is expected to save time in documenting baseline conditions for resource analysis and conservation planning.

Natural Resource Data Marts and Services

The USDA-NRCS-ITC supported by the OMS Team has deployed and maintains soil (SSURGO), climate, and land management operations (LMOD) data marts and data access services to supply inputs to OMS/CSIP model services.  The soil data mart contains 33 million soil mapunits and associated parameters for deployed model services.  The 320 gigabyte data mart has been horizontally partitioned to ensure rapid access to data.  The climate data mart contains approximately 10,000 climate locations and parameters for erosion model services.  LMOD provides approximately 55,000 management templates, 3,000 crops (vegetations), and 1,000 operations.