News — Chao Chen, a postdoctoral researcher in Boise State University’s geoscience department, has been awarded the Hydroinformatics Innovation Fellowship from the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrological Science, Inc (CUAHSI) for an independently developed project. This one-year, $5000 fellowship is the first of its kind to ever be awarded by CUAHSI, and will enable Chen and her colleagues to create an online computer application that will ensure quality control of data pertaining to hydroinformatics.
CUAHSI offers a web-based open-access platform where researchers can share water information through publishing and accessing multi-source datasets, which cover both observations and modeling outcomes in meteorology, groundwater, surface water, water quality and much more. However, currently there is no application within the platform to control the minimum quality standards of the uploaded information.
“With hydrological research, while the guaranteed veracity of observed data is crucial to understanding, analyzing and predicting environmental systems, the validity and quality of many datasets cannot always be guaranteed,” said Chen. “With vast data contributors shared on the CUAHSI service, we proposed an application providing tools for configuring quality control tests to run on their data with customizable parameters, to ensure that all CUAHSI-hosted data will have, at minimum, a base level of quality control.”
The project will be completed in collaboration with colleagues from East Carolina University and University of Nevada, Reno. Hailing from China, with degrees from Hohai University and University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Chen aspires to even greater achievements in her field.
“I’m looking forward to leveraging my expertise in hydrology and water resources to facilitate the advancement of human-water harmony. On one side, I’m always passionate about understanding water by looking at its mechanistic processes within the earth system. On the other side, I’d like to share my knowledge with the public, decision makers and colleagues to facilitate the easiness, accessibility and advancement of this multidisciplinary realm.”
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