EarthSim: Flexible Environmental Simulation Workflows Entirely Within Jupyter Notebooks

Building environmental simulation workflows is typically a slow process involving multiple proprietary desktop tools that do not interoperate well. In this work, we demonstrate building flexible, lightweight workflows entirely in Jupyter notebooks. We demonstrate these capabilities through examples in hydrology and hydrodynamics using the AdH (Adaptive Hydraulics) and GSSHA (Gridded Surface Subsurface Hydrologic Analysis) simulators. The goal of this work is to provide a set of tools that work well together and with the existing scientific python ecosystem, that can be used in browser based environments and that can easily be reconfigured and repurposed as needed to rapidly solve specific emerging issues such as hurricanes or dam failures.

As part of this work, extensive improvements were made to several general-purpose open source packages, including support for annotating and editing plots and maps in Bokeh and HoloViews, rendering large triangular meshes and regridding large raster data in HoloViews, GeoViews, and Datashader, and widget libraries for Param. In addition, two new open source projects are being released, one for triangular mesh generation (Filigree) and one for environmental data access (Quest).