Open Source WRF-Hydro GIS Pre-Processing Tools - Beta

To help WRF-Hydro users create surface input data for WRF-Hydro we have created a set of tools as an open source alternative to ArcGIS. While the new utilities contain the similar capabilities and produce similar model input files to the existing tools, the open-source GIS pre-processing tools aim to serve different user communities and may be run in similar software architectures as the WRF-Hydro model itself. The new GIS pre-processing routines use Python version 3 and several key python libraries such as Whitebox Tools, NumPy, netCDF4-python, GDAL, and others. Users may elect to build a suitable software environment using Anaconda or Miniconda, or build their own environment to run these tools inside of.

The motivations for building an open-source GIS Pre-processing funcationality for WRF-Hydro are many:

1) An open-source alternative was the most requested feature by WRF-Hydro users of the existing GIS Pre-processing tools.
2) The utility is protable and multi-platform.
3) The geoprocessing functions are parallelized and efficient.
4) All underlying libraries are open-source.
5) All proprietary licensing and application restrictions have been eliminated.
6) The new utility can be run inside the WRF-Hydro Training Docker container
7) The Whitebox Tools library offers several additional algorithms for terrain pre-processing.
Detailed documentation is forthcoming, but the tools come with basic help functionality, and options may be cross-referenced from the WRF-Hydro ArcGIS Pre-processing tools for additional detail for now.
Updated WRF-Hydro Training materials provide a WRF-Hydro GIS Pre-processing Tool Overview