Operational Delivery of Hydro-Meteorological Monitoring and Modeling Over the

The Australian Water Availability Project (AWAP) is a system that operationally delivers weekly estimates of soil mois- ture storesandwaterfluxesatcontinentalscaleoverAustralia.The highlymodularized system implementsaminiature spatial datain- frastructurebyexploitingasimpledataformatstandardandmeta- data scheme to enable the flexible ingestion of a variety of input data types, including gridded meteorological fields, land surface parameterizations and, optionally, remote sensing data. The use of these standards, together with a client-server architecture and portable coding, enable the system to function across multiple in- terchangeable computers, leading to a robust system with a high degreeofredundancy.Throughawell-definedinterface,theframe- work supports the development and testing of multiple models. Thorough model and data version-control and log file capture also allowsautomatedoperationalrunsinthesameenvironmentasthat in which models are built and tested. The system includes a web portal (http://www.csiro.au/awap) that provides a variety of ways for data users to dynamically explore and examine output (which currently includes over a century of data for the Australian con- tinent at monthly intervals, in addition to weekly near-real-time products) in summary or extended forms.