TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Collaboration is at the core of research at the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology, or CIROH. CIROH’s hybrid cloud cyberinfrastructure supports open-source community resources shared by hundreds of students, researchers and water professionals across 28 partner institutions, strengthening community collaboration, advancing water resources modeling and propelling improvements in water prediction.
“As more students and researchers join CIROH projects, the volume of work people want to share grows. That growth is really what pushed us to build the consortium-level portals,” said Arpita Patel, CIROH assistant director of IT and development operations, or DevOps. “If a tool or a dataset already exists, people can build on it instead of starting from scratch.”
Creating a Collaborative Space
When CIROH was founded in 2022, there was no formal place to organize and share the consortium’s work. Researchers wanted to share their code, run models, create datasets and store presentations, so Patel, former CIROH assistant director Dr. James Halgren and Benjamin Lee, a CIROH development operations engineer, began developing cyberinfrastructure to meet this need. Over the next several years, their team created DocuHub while other developers at Brigham Young University, Aquaveo and the Alabama Water Institute developed and deployed CIROH Portal. These two sites were unified to become CIROH Hub in early 2026. CIROH Hub brings together community resources shared by members, including applications, notebooks and courses that can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection.
In addition to CIROH Hub, the cyberinfrastructure and DevOps team supports CIROH projects by providing cloud computing and data access to every project contributor who requests access. Many CIROH projects involve work on detailed models with integrated artificial intelligence, so researchers need large amounts of processing power to study the models and make improvements.
“We give them access so they can do their research from day one, and they don’t have to wait for more computing power and storage,” said Patel. “Today, we are supporting more than 50 users on Amazon Web Services, 200 users on Google Cloud and 2i2c, 70 users for on-premises high-performance computing and 100 users on the National Science Foundation ACCESS resources across the CIROH Research to Operations Hybrid Cloud, or R2OHC.”
Advancing Water Modeling Through Open Resources
For researchers not involved with CIROH projects, many resources are still available. Every application, dataset, course, presentation, notebook and publication on CIROH Hub is open source, so anyone can access, modify and distribute the content.
Researchers can also access and contribute to open-source code on the CIROH UA GitHub account. Over 135 unique contributors have shared code across more than 70 GitHub repositories, providing easy access to tools like Next Gen In A Box, or NGIAB, as well as opportunities to improve them. Contributions are not limited to the CIROH members. Members of the public can propose code changes, also called “pull requests,” and provide suggestions and feedback to authors.
CIROH’s NGIAB is among these open-source success stories. NGIAB takes the NextGen Water Modeling Framework created by NOAA’s Office of Water Prediction and packages it into an easy-to-use software environment, making the model accessible for researchers with limited technical resources.
CIROH and Lynker created the original NGIAB package and because it was open-source, collaborators from at least eight more universities and research organizations joined the effort to improve data processing, model integration, evaluation, visualization and other areas within NGIAB. Now, NGIAB enables researchers in CIROH and across the world of water research to accomplish detailed analyses of hydrologic systems.
Read more about the impacts of NGIAB in this article.
Visibility Enhances Collaboration
All CIROH community resources exist to facilitate collaboration and improvements in water modeling. Open resources make it easy for researchers inside and outside of CIROH to stay aware of the research taking place across CIROH.
“The more visibility everyone gets through the CIROH Hub, the more collaboration comes out. If someone sees something that is relevant to their work, it is easy to reach out and connect,” said Patel.
This collaborative model takes advantage of the variety of expertise within CIROH. Researchers with experience in computer science, geoscience, hydrology and physics interact with others at many different career stages, from students eager to work on new technology to experienced scientists and professors who can provide mentorship and support.
CIROH’s work could not be accomplished without its diverse community contributors and the opportunity to build on the work of others. At CIROH, even small contributions provide the foundation for community water resources modeling and move toward a future of water resilience.
About CIROH
The Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) is a NOAA Cooperative Institute hosted at The University of Alabama and supported by the National Weather Service. As a unique national consortium with 28 partner institutions, CIROH unites academic, government and private sector partners to co-produce research that enhances operational water prediction capabilities and informs critical decision-making for issues like floods, droughts and water quality. Through its interdisciplinary research, educational initiatives and outreach programs, CIROH advances NOAA’s water prediction services with new techniques such as artificial intelligence and remote sensing, equips the next generation of water-resource professionals with essential skills and fosters public and stakeholder engagement to support federal agency and private sector needs. CIROH transforms scientific innovations into practical solutions and operational tools that boosts the delivery of actionable water intelligence, increases effectiveness of water resources management, promotes community resilience and informs decision-makers across the United States.