FutureWater Indiana: A science gateway for spatio-temporal modeling of water in Wabash basin with a focus on climate change

In this manuscript, we describe the FutureWater Science Gateway, which simulates regional watersheds spatially and temporally to derive hydrological changes due to changes in critical effectors such as climate, land use and management, and soil conditions. We also discuss the gateway design, creation, and production deployment and how the resulting data is organized and explored. The FutureWater gateway is built based on the Apache Airavata gateway middleware framework and hosted under the SciGaP project at Indiana University. The gateway provides an integrated infrastructure for simulations based on parallelized Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and SWAT-MODFLOW software execution on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) and Indiana University’s (IU’s) HPC resources. It organizes data in optimized relational databases and enables intuitive simulation result data exploration. The visualization involves geographical map integration and dynamic data provisioning using the R-Shiny application deployed in the gateway. The gateway provides simple, intuitive user interfaces for providing simulation input data and combines available model data; it makes it possible to set up and execute the simulation on HPC systems and ingest the results into the databases. The portal addresses the needs of diverse stakeholder communities for education, research, exploration, and planning in academic, governmental, and non-governmental organizations.