The Hydro-Terrestrial Earth System Testbed (HyTEST) Organization is a community promoting open, reproducible, and scalable tools and workflows for hydrological modeling on advanced computing platforms. Initiated as a collaboration between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), HyTEST seeks to build a diverse community of researchers and open-source developers focused on improving the usability of hydro-terrestrial data and models, creating an interdisciplinary team that cuts across academia, government, and industry.
Following the successful approach of the Pangeo Community, instead of building monolithic software environments, we seek out tools and approaches widely used in the open-source development community. We add value by testing them on our domain-specific workflows and by contributing enhancements, building modeling testbeds that support open and reproducible science. This approach benefits end-users by enabling them to more easily leverage contributions by others, while improving the flexibility and future-proofing of how they use these. With a diverse community of developers, users, and stakeholders participating in the HyTEST Organization, there will be a pathway for sharing the best modeling tools and workflows into the future.
The HyTEST organization encompasses a multitude of repositories.
The hytest repo is where users can find demonstrations, tutorials, and explanatory Jupyter Notebooks for common workflows encountered in the hydrologic and atmospheric modeling fields. These workflows cover development, evaluation, and visualization of small to large scale modeling applications on computational environments such as the cloud, high performance computers, or local environments. Most of the formal tutorials in this repository are published in our HyTEST JupyterBook, which proves a user-friendly access point to explore our materials. Additional demonstrations may be available in the repository that are not published in the JupyterBook, but they are not always fully documented for sharing with users.
Additional repositories may be set up to store data exploration apps, dataset preprocessing workflows that were used to generate HyTEST-hosted datasets, or any number of additional research or data processing topics. Anything that will be shared with our user-base through the HyTEST JupyterBook or as an informal demo should be submitted to the hytest repository, which is intended as our primary user-facing access point. Any research/exploratory work, app development, or workflows to archive dataset preprocessing workflows should be set up in their own repositories.
The HyTEST Organization is excited to foster collaboration amongst members and newcomers. We hope to hear more about real-world applications of HyTEST workflows, workflow improvements and suggestions, bug fixes, demo and tutorial additions. We are happy to grow membership in HyTEST and connect with developers and researchers that aim for similar principles of open-source, reproducible science.
If you have bug fixes, suggestions, ideas for helpful tutorials or demos, course material, or want to share new developments in the hydrologic and atmospheric software community, please see further details on contributing. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to HyTEST members with any questions or problems with submitting an issue to the repo.
