Location: Water Management and Systems Research
Project Number: 3012-13660-010-028-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jan 1, 2024
End Date: Mar 31, 2025
Objective:
The Cooperator will enhance and fully document a graphical user interface (GUI) for the MultiGroup Particle Swarm Optimization (MG-PSO) method for calibration of the ARS Ages watershed model. All software developed in this project will be open source and freely available for use within and outside of ARS. Documentation and training in how to use various features will enhance broad use of the GUI and adoption of MG-PSO for efficient model calibration.
Approach:
The Agricultural Ecosystem Services (Ages) model is designed to simulate biophysical interactions from farm field to watershed scales. Calibration of Ages is essential for its application to food and water security, because once fully calibrated, Ages can extend experimental research regionally and address various scenarios. Models like Ages currently take weeks to calibrate, but could be calibrated in hours using cloud computing to expedite research projects and reduce total development costs. Wide-spread deployment of Ages requires improved tools for model calibration, and the proposed model calibration interface is a crucial end-product to support efficient, cloud-based model calibration. Rapid calibration, testing, and deployment of model results will extend core ARS research to other researchers and action agencies.
ARS and collaborators at Colorado State University have developed a cloud-service calibration method that integrates Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to find optimal values of model parameters. The new approach classifies model parameters by process into multiple groups that run sequentially (stepwise) or in parallel. The MultiGroup-PSO (MG-PSO) method has been implemented as a Python library and uses the Cloud Services Integration Platform (CSIP). Further work is needed to develop the services into a readily accessible tool that is deployed for a wide range of model users. Management of parallel processing will be facilitated using the Kubernetes platform supported by the interface, and evisualization of calibrated model results will be added to the tool. All inputs to the GUI will be documented as help content within the GUI, the tool will be fully described as a journal paper submitted for peer-review publication, and the cooperator will assist with training at a conference workshop.
The new user interface will be made available on platforms, such as the NSF-sponsored Hydroshare or Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (CSDMS), to provide broad dissemination of the findings and the tools to a wider modeling community.
