From OpenMI to HydroCouple: Advancing OpenMI to Support Experimental Simulations and Standard Geospatial Datasets

Session A2: Interoperability, Reusability, and Integrated Systems

HydroCouple is a cross-platform, component-based modeling interface definition that largely follows the Open Modeling Interface 2.0 (OpenMI) specification. HydroCouple provides advancements to better facilitate those experimental model investigations that fall into the so-called “embarrassingly parallel” class of simulations, including uncertainty assessment, ensemble forecasting, and optimization simulations. Additionally, HydroCouple explicitly incorporates low level interface definitions for multi- dimensional datasets and geospatial data formats including the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Simple Feature Access specification, raster datasets, and meshes that are widely used in the earth systems and environmental modeling field. In this paper, we describe these and other advances provided by the HydroCouple interface definitions. We also illustrate how these advances can be used to facilitate parallelized experimental model simulations that have so far been challenging in OpenMI and other component-based modeling frameworks.