FAIR DATA Fund use case: Atmospheric moisture tracking preprocessing with WAM2layers

WAM2layers is a mois­ture-track­ing mod­el (water-account­ing mod­el) that can be used to study the trans­port of water in the atmos­phere, from source (sur­face evap­o­ra­tion) to sink (pre­cip­i­ta­tion) or vice ver­sa.

Build­ing on pre­vi­ous work — Ruud van der Ent, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor at TU Delft and FAIR Data Fund grantee, col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Nether­lands eScience Cen­ter and researchers from Stock­holm Uni­ver­si­ty to use the fund for the devel­op­ment and pub­lish­ing of the fol­low­ing dataset: WAM2layers pre­processed data from 01-01-1941 until 31-10-2014. Ver­sion 2. 4TU.ResearchData dataset. https://doi.org/10.4121/00f7fa45-899e-4573-ae23-234f6c5193d0.v2.

The data is gen­er­at­ed by the pre­pro­cess­ing step of the mois­ture track­ing mod­el WAM2layers v3. This dataset gives users the pos­si­bil­i­ty to imme­di­ate­ly pro­ceed with actu­al mois­ture track­ing with WAM2layers v3 to deter­mine mois­ture trans­port in the atmos­phere.

In the project, the team fur­ther devel­oped full inte­gra­tion of access­ing this dataset ‘on-the-fly’ from with­in the exist­ing WAM2layers v3 soft­ware. New soft­ware users can quick­er get to do actu­al mois­ture track­ing for their study area of inter­est. Expe­ri­enced users can also test hypothe­ses about trends, extremes and anom­alies of mois­ture trans­port with­out the need to down­load huge vol­umes of ERA5-reanaly­sis data first.

Prac­ti­cal key results

• Access to the pre­processed data on the OPeN­DAP data ser­vice ‘on-the-fly’ with­in the WAM2layers soft­ware: https://github.com/WAM2layers/WAM2layers/pull/475
• A dataset of almost a cen­tu­ry of pre-pocessed mois­ture track­ing data!

The fig­ure shows the accu­mu­lat­ed tracked mois­ture sources of the extreme pre­cip­i­ta­tion event of 13–14 July 2021.

How the FAIR Data Fund sup­port­ed the project

The FAIR Data Fund allowed the project team to hire a research soft­ware engi­neer (Peter Kalver­la, Ned­er­lands E‑Science Cen­ter) to sup­port the data and soft­ware inte­gra­tion. Fur­ther­more, the 4TU.ResearchData team helped with file con­ver­sions and fur­ther waived the pub­lish­ing fee for the data of larg­er stor­age capac­i­ty.

“We are extreme­ly grate­ful to the team and 4TU.ResearchData in gen­er­al, for the sup­port offered for our project.” says Ruud van der Ent, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor at the Depart­ment of Water Man­age­ment, TU Delft.