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ClearWater Modules in Python

The ClearWater-modules package is a collection of water quality and vegetation process simulation modules written in modern Python and designed to flexibily couple with a variety of water transport models, such as RAS-2D, GSSHA, CE-Qual-W2, AdH, and others. These modules have been developed by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), Environmental Laboratory (EL).

These water quality modules form the central capabilities of the ClearWater (Corps Library for Environmental Analysis and Restoration of Watersheds) software system. The overall goal of the ClearWater system is to couple these water quality simulation capabilites to state-of-the art hydrologic and hydraulic modeling tools, such as HEC-RAS-2D, CE-Qual-W2, and GSSHA, allowing users to leverage existing river, reservoir, and waterhed models for water quality studies. At present, TSM and NSM have been successfully coupled to HEC-RAS-2D models via the ClearWater-riverine package.

A secondary goal is to develop a suite of easy-to-use modern Python tools that build on community-developed scientific workflows, standards, and libraries to automate model setup, prepare input datasets, store output data, and visualize results using Python-based user interfaces such as Jupyter Notebooks.

This Python library is a port and modernization of the algorithms and structures originally written in Fortran 95, released as version 1.0 in 2021, and described in:

Repository Directories

Getting Started

Installation

Clearwater-modules was developed with Python 3.11.

Follow these steps to install.

1. Install Miniconda or Anaconda Distribution

We recommend installing the light-weight Miniconda that includes Python, the conda environment and package management system, and their dependencies.

NOTE: Follow conda defaults to install in your local user director. DO NOT install for all users, to avoid substantial headaches with permissions.

If you have already installed the Anaconda Distribution, you can use it to complete the next steps, but you may need to update to the latest version.

2. Clone or Download this ClearWater-modules repository

From this Github site, click on the green "Code" dropdown button near the upper right. Select to either Open in GitHub Desktop (i.e. git clone) or "Download ZIP". We recommend using GitHub Desktop, to most easily receive updates.

Place your copy of this repo folder in any convenient location on your computer.

3. Create a Conda Environment for this Repository (optional)

We recommend creating a custom virtual environment with the Conda package, dependency, and environment management for any language (i.e. easily install C++ packages such as GDAL).

We provide an environment.yml file that specifies for Conda how to create a virtual environment that contains the same software dependencies that we've used in development and testing.

Create a ClearWater-modules environment using this conda command in your terminal or Anaconda Prompt console. If necessary, replace environment.yml with the full file pathway to the environment.yml file in the local cloned repository.

conda env create --file environment.yml

Alternatively, use the faster libmamba solver with:

conda env create -f environment.yml --solver=libmamba

Activate the environment using the instructions printed by conda after the environment is created successfully.

To update your environment to the latest versions of dependencies and/or add additional dependencies to your environment (by first editting environment.yml), run the following command:

conda env update -f environment.yml --solver=libmamba --prune

or to recreate from scratch:

conda env create -f environment.yml --solver=libmamba --force

For additional information on managing conda environments, see Conda's User Guide on Managing Environments.

4. Add your ClearWater-modules Path to Miniconda/Anaconda sites-packages

To have access to the clearwater_riverine module in your Python environments, it is necessary to have a path to your copy of Clearwater Riverine in Anaconda's sites-packages directory (i.e. something like $HOME/path/to/anaconda/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages or $HOME/path/to/anaconda/lib/site-packages similar).

The easiest way to do this is to use the conda develop command in the console or terminal like this, replacing /path/to/module/ with the full file pathway to the local cloned Clearwater-riverine repository:

conda develop /path/to/module/

You should now be able to run the examples and create your own Jupyter Notebooks!

Examples

Contributing

Acknowlgements

The vision for modernizing this library, including the initial port to Python from Fortran, was develped by:

The algorithms and structure of this program were adapted from the Fortran 95 version 1.0 of these modules, originally developed by: