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Table of Contents

• The Water Resources Evaluation Service
  • What are the options for deploying and operating WRES?
  • What is the COWRES?
  • What are the general instructions for using the WRES to perform an evaluation?
  • What if I just want to download a release and run the WRES as a command-line application?
    • 1. Make sure you have the correct version of Java, which must be Java 17 or higher.
    • 2. Obtain the latest distribution .zip.
    • 3. Unpackage the file and execute your evaluation.
  • What if I want to obtain and build the software myself?
  • Disclaimer: Data Accuracy

The Water Resources Evaluation Service

The Water Resources Evaluation Service (WRES) is a comprehensive service for evaluating the quality of model predictions, such as hydrometeorological forecasts. The WRES encapsulates a data-to-statistics evaluation pipeline, including reading data from files or web services, rescaling data, changing measurement units, filtering data, pairing predictions and observations, allocating pairs to pools based on pooling criteria (e.g., common forecast lead times), computing statistics and writing statistics formats.

What are the options for deploying and operating WRES?

The WRES has three modes of operation:

• "Cluster mode" using a web-service instance. This is the preferred mechanism for deploying the WRES "at scale" as a centrally-managed, multi-user or "cluster" instance on server hardware and is described in the wiki, WRES Web Service (wiki is yet to be written), which includes instructions for setting up a web service instance. An example instance is the COWRES described in the next section.

• "Standalone mode" using a short-running instance. This requires no particular installation or deployment and is the preferred mechanism for a "laptop user", i.e., for performing modestly-sized evaluations on consumer hardware. This mechanism is described in Obtaining and using the WRES as a standalone application and requires either downloading an official release (preferred) or cloning the source code and building the software locally.

• "Standalone mode" using a long-running, local-server instance. This has a similar scope of application to a short-running standalone (see above). However, it benefits from reduced latency/spin-up time because the software is running continuously in the background. This mechanism is described in the wiki WRES Local Server. It, too, requires either downloading a release artifact (preferred) or cloning the source code and building the software locally.

In each mode, evaluations may be executed in main memory (RAM), which generally improves performance, but is only viable for evaluations whose datasets will fit in main memory, or against a database, which is generally required for larger evaluations across many geographic features. See Instructions for Using WRES for more information.

What is the COWRES?

In various places throughout these wikis, the "COWRES" is referenced. The COWRES is the Central OWP WRES, a WRES web-service hosted centrally at the National Water Center (NWC) in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and available for use from National Weather Service (NWS) River Forecast Center (RFC) and Office of Water Prediction (OWP) machines. If the COWRES is available to a user, it is highly recommended that the user use the COWRES as opposed to the other modes of operations. It is centrally supported, capable of handling very large evaluations since it is backed by a Postgres database server, and has access to both USGS NWIS and Water Resources Data Service (WRDS) web services. Formal support for the COWRES is provided through the WRES User Support project in NOAA's VLab webservice.

What are the general instructions for using the WRES to perform an evaluation?

See Instructions for Using WRES. This wiki will redirect you to other wikis, as needed, including to the Declaration language wiki for evaluation declaration instructions, and for the different modes of deployment/operation described above.

What if I just want to download a release and run the WRES as a command-line application?

Running the WRES as a command-line application, described in Obtaining and using the WRES as a standalone application, may be the simplest way to execute the software. Instructions are summarized below. However, this is less efficient than a central (cluster) deployment because each instance must be deployed, managed, updated and supported separately.

If a web-service instance is available, such as the COWRES, it is highly recommended that you use it.

1. Make sure you have the correct version of Java, which must be Java 17 or higher.

2. Obtain the latest distribution .zip.

a. Navigate to the releases page, https://github.com/NOAA-OWP/wres/releases.

b. Download the latest core zip from the assets of the most recent deployment. That .zip should follow the pattern, wres-DATE-VERSION.zip.

3. Unpackage the file and execute your evaluation.

Unzip the release package and change directory to the unzipped wres directory. To execute a project you can run the following command:

bin/wres execute your_evaluation.yml

What if I want to obtain and build the software myself?

To obtain and build the software yourself, see What if I want to clone the repository and build the WRES for local use? in Obtaining and using the WRES as a standalone application.

Disclaimer: Data Accuracy

The WRES sources time-series and other datasets from web services. These data sources can vary significantly in quality. It is the responsibility of the user to verify the accuracy of the datasets used for model evaluations. In some cases, such as USGS stage and discharge measurements, data may be provisional, i.e., subject to change. The quality of the measurements from individual instruments can vary significantly. An evaluation is only as informative as the datasets being evaluated. Users are assumed to have considered the site-specific details of the data before interpreting and using any evaluation statistics to guide their decision processes.