Resources

As part of the planning process for large scale environmental observatories, the National Science Foundation has funded 10 WATERS Test Bed projects to test various aspects of observatory design and operation. These two-year projects are developing technologies ranging from collection of data from floating sensors to determining optimal placement of real-time nitrate sensors. Test Bed sites are located in a range of environmental conditions from the high Sierra Nevada to urban Baltimore. The sites are acting as beta test locations for the deployment of CUAHSI HIS project server capability that enables the Test Beds to archive and publish their own data in a standardized relational database schema known as the Observations Data Model (ODM).

The goals of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS) Project are to unite the nation's water information, to make it universally accessible and useful, and to provide access to the data sources, tools and models that enable the synthesis, visualization and evaluation of the behavior of hydrologic systems. The CUAHSI HIS is a geographically distributed network of hydrologic data sources and functions that are integrated using web services so that they function as a connected whole. The CUAHSI HIS website contains tools for implementing Hydrologic Information Systems.

The CUAHSI Observations Data Model (ODM) was designed for the storage and retrieval of hydrologic observations in a relational database. ODM stores hydrologic observations data in a system designed to optimize data retrieval for integrated analysis of information collected by multiple investigators. This website contains resources for creating ODM databases in Microsoft SQL Server 2005, for loading observations data into an ODM database, for editing the CUAHSI ODM controlled vocabularies, and for querying, visualizing, and editing data stored in an ODM database.