A Web-Based Interface for SWAT Modeling on the TeraGrid
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Abstract
The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is a river basin scale model developed by the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS). It is widely used by researchers in various scientific domains to study the impact of land management practices on water quantity, sediment, and water quality in large watersheds over long periods of time. Currently most users run SWAT tests on their own desktop or laptop computers. While this is adequate for some, users who need to complete a large number of SWAT runs or calibration of the SWAT model for complex watersheds require more powerful computational and storage resources. In this paper we describe an effort to make the SWAT model easily accessible and useable to a larger class of users through a web portal interface. The SWAT portal allows users to run SWAT simulations using the distributed resources provided by the TeraGrid - a national cyberinfrastructure for high end computing funded by the National Science Foundation. This portal supports three types of SWAT simulations: regular simulation, auto calibration, and sensitivity analysis. It provides an intuitive interface for users to configure one or multiple SWAT cases, submit these runs as computation jobs to the TeraGrid, monitor job status, visualize results and download output. This TeraGrid based SWAT portal uses a shared community account to submit jobs to the TeraGrid resource, thus eliminating the need for users to know the details of TeraGrid allocation request and usage. Any user with a browser can connect to this portal over the Internet and benefit from the resources on the TeraGrid. This paper describes the design and implementation of the SWAT portal as well as several case studies by our early users and our future plan to improve the SWAT portal.
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