This work explores the use of hydroinformatics tools to provide a user friendly and accessible interface for executing and visualizing the output of distributed hydrological models for Iowa. It uses an IFIS-based web environment for graphical displays and it communicates with the ASYNCH ODE solver to provide input parameters and to gather modeling outputs. The distributed hydrologic models used here are based on the segmentation of the terrain into hillslope-link hydrologic units, for which water flow processes are represented by sets of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. This modeling strategy has shown promising results in in modeling extreme flood events in the state of Iowa – USA. The usage and evaluation of outputs from hillslope-link models (HLM) has been limited to a restrict group of academics due to the demand of high processing capability and the number of customized tools needed to visualize model outputs. HLM-based models provide abundant output information on rainfall-runoff processes of the hydrological cycle, including estimates of discharge for all streams in the state of Iowa, and for all conceptual vertical layers of water storage in soils.
The interfaces and methodologies developed in this thesis respond to the constant demand for communicating effectively water-related information from academic communities to the public using hydroinformatics tools to provide an accessible portal to the information generated by complex hydrological models. It also facilitates model development and evaluation by allowing rapid development of what-if scenarios. This work represents a significant advance in this direction, and the results have been made publicly available online under the URL http://ifis.iowafloodcenter.org/ifis/sc/modelplus/.