[user]: Riley Hales

[rileyhales]

Your Name

Riley Hales

Your Institution

Brigham Young University

Your Location

Provo Utah USA

Your Use Case

I (speaking on behalf of my colleagues) use RAPID as a component of a global hydrologic modeling program sponsored by the GEOGloWS (Group on Earth Observations Global Water Sustainability) Initiative. This started as a research idea for the National Water Center which was a precursor to what is now the National Water Model. This model is currently scaling up to cover almost the full world, 9-10 million basins, ECMWF forecast & hindcast runoff, a brand new delineated stream network created by the NGA (national geospatial intelligence agency) derived from the TanDEMX 10 meter DEM.

Why RAPID?

Some of the important features of rapid for my applications are:

• calculates on vector basins rather than grids
• No GUI -> easily controlled with command line scripts which is important for automation.
• implements a sufficiently sophisticated routing method to get good results
• scales well computationally speaking (though I only barely learned from you the way i was taught to use rapid was not remotely the most efficient way!)
• open source

How do you use RAPID?

I compile rapid directly on an ECMWF supercomputer and then use rapidpy (https://github.com/byu-hydroinformatics/rapidpy) to orchestrate running the many simulations (per watershed, forecast and hindcast, etc) in parallel as new forecast/hindcast runoff data is available. I am transitioning away from that approach and will likely take more advantage of the docker images and compute clusters on their infrastructure. We test and perform other simulations on standard desktops/laptops and on AWS and Azure.

Anything else you'd like us to know?

As we've recently discovered, the BYU/GEOGloWS crowd haven't been using rapid as efficiently as possible. We'd like to find a way to help compile some additional documentation/cheat-sheets for the rapid_namelist file, the options for solvers, and a few things like that to better help us be self sufficient. We can generate that but would need it to be checked by someone who knows.

Are you aware of our philosphy for open source?

• [X] I have read the last paragraph of Section 6.3 in David et al., 2016 (the one starting with "Finally, and contrary to common belief, open source software does not mean...")

[c-h-david]

@rileyhales, thanks for completing your RAPID User Information form! Listen, I love the idea of community crowd-sourced information to help RAPID users. I've actually been contemplating trying to update the RAPID website to instead use the markdown language and publish the website code on GitHub for easy updates . If you'd like to draft a short (say one-page) document that explains what you recently learnt, I'll find a way to include it! Happy to chat about this as well.