Discussion: Sep 04, 2023

Long Description

The Global Lake Hydrology Explorer is a project that I’m working on as an undergraduate student, and I’m still very much figuring things out. But here’s the goal: I wanted to create a tool that helps people like me, who might not be hydrology experts, make sense of complex hydrology data.

This tool is all about bridging that gap. Visualizing how water flows in and out of lakes, using global datasets on rainfall, evaporation, and runoff from all around the world. You select any lake in the world (above like 10 ha, which is pretty small!), and this tool will give you a snapshot of what’s going on with the mass balance of the lake.

I am doing this because I believe there is a growing gap between the complexity of data that hydrologists use and the kind of stuff that people who manage water resources need and can understand. It’s like two different languages. I’m hoping that this tool can help translate between those languages a bit.

As part of that process, this tool is all about understanding. So, this tool takes you through the whole process, showing you step by step how the data turns into those graphs and charts. It’s a reality check for the data.

Now, I say this tool will be ‘open’ because I’d love for this tool to be available to everyone, but that’s still a work in progress. So, stay tuned! Thanks for listening to me!

Status & Plans

  1. Got CLAY and LIME fully seperated

  2. Now they need to talk to each other, is that also PUBSUB?!? Who knows!!!

  3. But first, I’ll do the lake selector part in google earth engine!

  4. Get Sphinx Documentation working for the code…?