Streamflow simulation system in continuous and discrete space

The stress on water resources is increasing as a result of population growth, global warming, urbanization and many other interrelated factors. Because of this, efforts to continuously model the key states in the hydrologic system, specifically streamflow, have resulted. Unfortunately, large scale streamflow simulation in hydrologic sciences has not kept up with the development of large scale numerical weather models in atmospheric sciences. This in part can be attributed to the complexity of the modeling domain where numerical weather models can predominantly run on a continuous gridded domain whereas streamflow simulation models require the integration of both continuous gridded domains (e.g. land surface, subsurface) and continuous discrete feature domains (e.g. river channel network, lakes and reservoirs, point observations). As such, this dissertation presents a fundamental geospatial framework for supporting continuous large scale streamflow simulations through both regional and continental scale applications. As this effort requires myriad water data (much of which is becoming increasingly available via Web services), this dissertation begins with a discussion of atmospheric and hydrologic data in continuous and discrete space within the context of data dissemination. At the regional scale it is demonstrated how data from disparate data sources can be integrated to simulate real-time streamflow for over 5,000 NHDPlus river reaches while at the continental scale, a streamflow simulation system operating on 2.7 million NHDPlus river reaches is presented.