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Personas |
As a way to confirm that we meet our goals and that the system we designed will indeed be useful to the hydrology community we created 4 personas that will use eWatercycle II: PhD student, Old Professor, Deltares consultant and Red Cross logistic manager. These personas have abstract use-cases as well as concrete use cases that are based on each persona’s needs. We will also approach the scientific community to provide us with (published) articles that could have benefited from the project.
Femke is a PhD environmental science student in Luik university. She has a MsC in environmental science. She would like to have a modeling PhD and publish 4 papers. She will focus on modeling trees, i.e., % of trees per unit area, amount of water that is captured in different types of trees and their effect on the water balance in their surrounding.
Research Question:
How much water is retained by different trees, how does it affect water balance in the region? Ultimate goal is to improve/create a model that best represent reality and to expand it to global scale.
What can eWatercycle do for her?
eWaterCycle offers a platform that already has the model and an environment to run the model. We will provide global data (thus the PhD student will not have to spend the time and effort that contacting the community and collecting the data will usually involve). eWaterCycle will provide a visual environment where the student can analyze the results and compare the models she used.
Currently, it would usually take months to run the model (find the relevant data, understand and adjust the configuration file, actually succeed to run the model and finally analyze the results). Using eWaterCycle II it would take her a few days and she could access many more models, and compare them for the region in question.
Fatima is a 60 year old professor at Cornell university. She is a famous hydrology professor, head of a hydrology group composed of 2 associate professors, 3 postdocs, 10 PhD students and 8 MsC students. She would like to answer big questions related to earth science but she has too many management meetings, too many proposals to write and not enough (efficient) students/postdocs to do the actual work. Still, Fatima is interested in doing some science herself, and she has many ideas for future research. She would like to examine her ideas’ feasibility in a quick and reliable manner, in order to apply for grants to hire and assign them to students (or herself, if she can spare some time to do actual research). After spending a sabbatical in Muhimbili University in Tanzania, her main interests are in predicting and preventing floods in Africa.
Research Questions:
Fatima would like to “solve” big questions in earth science and she would like to write a proposal for H2020 dedicated for floods predictions and preventions in Sub-Saharan Africa. She would like to test how man-made interventions in nature (specifically rivers) can reduce the total number and the strength of floods. In order to achieve this she would like to examine specific ideas and their potential effect on reality and she would like to have quick indications for the influence and the potential benefit of her ideas. For example: How would a change to the course of the Songwe river (located in the border between Tanzania and Malawi) would affect floods in the northern part of Malawi? Would different land use near the Upper Awash Basin affect floods in Ethiopia? What would be the reduction of floods occurrences if another dam would be built across the Awash River? Would a reservoir work better? Can we built a global sub-saharan hydrological society that will involve investments in projects in neighboring countries to solve floods on one hand and droughts on the other hand (cure hunger and win a nobel prize)?
What can eWatercycle do for her?
eWaterCycle would provide a platform to run experiments for different regions with different parameters. eWaterCycle will have the local models of the desired region, and the dataset required to run the models, so the professor would not need to collect data. We will provide a way to change model parts (fixed pars) for the desired geographical area. The platform will provide a way to easily include sub-models in an existing global model to examine the effect of the landuse change on a larger region. And finally we will have a visualization environment to display the models and the outcome.
With eWaterCycle the Prof. could run as many experiments as she would like, to change the model parameters, and to have a quick answer to questions like the best place to add a reservoir to the river in order to reduce flood risk. Accessing a number of models, having the ability to change parameters and to run different experiments in just a couple of days will allow her to prioritize her ideas and to apply for grants/hire new PhD students.
eWaterCycle will allow the Prof. to execute experiments and ideas that she wouldn’t be able to approach (time and resources-wise) otherwise. She can test ideas herself before handing them off to (MSc, BSc or PhD) students. She can supplement proposals with early analyses to prove the direction suggested is valuable.
Bert has a PhD in Geoscience from University van Amsterdam. He is a flood risk analyst in the department Water Risk Analysis at Deltares. He is involved in international flood risk studies, and in developing flood and drought forecasting systems, applied in different regions over the globe. As an expert, he is familiar with many hydrological models and he would like to be able to apply the most appropriate ones (play with data assimilation) to eventually come up with concrete recommendations to his employers. Bert state-of-mind is that he doesn't care if a model is correct, or what are the uncertainties. He would use as much data assimilation as needed for the outcome to represent the real physical conditions and to be useful for predictions. He would like to have fast results on a speedy run, with concrete advice that he can give his clients and convince the relevant stakeholders. Bert was hired to consult the German government about flood protection standards.
Research Question:
He would like to do an assessment of flood risk along the river Rhine.
What can eWatercycle do for him?
eWaterCycle will offer a platform that have different models and an environment to run them. We will allow modularization and easy coupling of (sub-) models . The system will have built-in Data Assimilation toolkits. We will also provide links to commonly used datasets.
For the Deltares consultant, the contribution and impact of eWaterCycle II will be the ability to choose the best model-data combination for a given region and time. Instead of weeks of running and analyzing different model-data combinations (including compiling the models, finding relevant forcing, etc) it will take him day(s) to figure which is the best scenario, allowing him to focus more on answering the clients questions in detail.
Juan is an adventurous 35 year old who wants to save the world. He studied anthropology in the university of Barcelona and after finishing his Master he volunteered for a year in Laos and Cambodia, where he became interested in hydrology. He saw the effect of floods on small poor villages in Laos and Cambodia and decided to dedicate his life to help people in similar situations. He developed a career in the Red Cross and is now the red-cross’s logistic manager for south-east Asia, located in Bangkok, Thailand. Juan is mostly interested in flood/cyclones predictions (1st order models), but also in failed harvest predictions (2nd order models) and how can it affect the food supply in the regions in his responsibility (3rd order models).
Question:
when and where should Juan distribute the emergency supply in the most beneficial way when a climate disaster is predicted?
What can eWatercycle do for him?
Juan should be in our mind but we will not necessarily be able to help him in this project. We do want to be able to use our output to eventually present a map of short-term predictions for Juan and other end users. Thus, eWaterCycle will have an intuitive user interface that Juan will be able to use to see the flood/cyclone prediction for the regions in question. The interface will present a visualization of the flood risks for every region, and will provide a recommendation for making decision regarding supply needs (based on flood risk and population resilience).