Hydro2go Tutorial

No environment setup.

No manual calibration.

Focus on the model and results.

Hydro2go was built for a simple reason: running a distributed hydrological model should not begin with days of environment setup, path editing, data wrangling, and calibration scripts. Those steps matter, but they are not the scientific question.

The platform handles the technical preparation around a SPHY model. You still decide where the basin outlet is, what resolution is appropriate, which years to simulate, and whether observed runoff should be used for automatic calibration. When the job is finished, you download a complete model folder that you can inspect, modify, and rerun.

Hydro2go removes technical friction. It does not remove scientific judgment.

Why Hydro2go

SPHY is powerful, but a first model run often requires much more than model thinking:

• installing a geospatial Python environment that actually works;
• preparing terrain, forcing, snow, glacier, land-cover, and soil inputs;
• delineating the basin from an outlet point;
• editing local paths and moving files between machines;
• configuring calibration files and scripts;
• checking whether the model really ran and where the outputs went.

Many users do not get stuck because the hydrology is impossible. They get stuck because the workflow around the model is fragile.

Hydro2go moves that fragile workflow to the platform side. The user-facing task becomes smaller and clearer: choose the outlet, choose the model resolution, choose the simulation years, optionally upload runoff observations, and download the prepared model package.

The result is not a black box. It is a working SPHY model directory that remains yours after download.

What Hydro2go Does

The basic idea is that almost everything technical happens on the Hydro2go side. You do not need to install SPHY, download global datasets, edit paths, or submit scripts manually.

The workflow is:

Your choices
  outlet
  model resolution
  simulation years
  optional runoff observations

Hydro2go platform
  delineates the basin
  prepares SPHY inputs
  runs preprocessing
  optionally calibrates the model
  packages the model and results

Your download
  complete SPHY model folder
  observations
  outputs if the model has run

Observed runoff data is only required when you enable automatic calibration. If you only want a prepared SPHY model package, you can leave automatic calibration off.

How to Use Hydro2go

This walkthrough uses Vanji as a small example basin. The same workflow applies to any basin supported by the platform data.

Step 1 - Sign in

Open Hydro2go and choose Login / Register. Google sign-in is recommended because it avoids a separate Hydro2go password. Email registration is also available.

You can explore the interface as a guest, but a real job submission requires sign-in.

Step 2 - Create a job

Open the workspace and fill the core settings:

You can type the outlet coordinates, but the better method is to click the outlet directly on the river map. Place the point on the river channel, because a small outlet error can change the basin boundary.

Step 3 - Choose whether to calibrate

If you leave Enable Automatic Calibration off, Hydro2go prepares the model package without observed runoff data.

If you turn Enable Automatic Calibration on, upload a runoff observation file. Hydro2go uses the runoff record to tune model parameters and return a model result. The platform will try to detect the available runoff years from the file.

For the Vanji example, the calibration period can be short, such as 2001-2005, so the test runs quickly.

Step 4 - Submit

Click Confirm. Hydro2go begins the platform-side work. The page will tell you if the boundary generation is queued or running. You can leave the page after submission and check progress later under My Jobs.

Step 5 - Track the job

Open My Jobs. The status is intentionally simple:

• Waiting for approval means the task is queued for platform-side processing.
• Processing means Hydro2go is generating inputs, running preprocessing, or running calibration.
• Completed means the result package is ready to download.
• Rejected means the task cannot run as submitted, usually because the basin is too large, the outlet is problematic, or required data is missing.

Step 6 - Download

When the job is completed, click the download link in My Jobs. Download links are temporary, so save the package while it is available.

What You Download

The download is a zip file named after your job. After unzipping, it contains a complete model workspace:

Vanji/
  Runmodel/
    input/
    output/
    standard_global.cfg
    run_model.sh
    sphy.py
  observations/
  README.md

The important folders are:

• Runmodel/ is the prepared SPHY model. This is the model itself, not just a report.
• Runmodel/input/ contains the prepared input data.
• Runmodel/output/ contains model output when a run has completed.
• observations/ contains uploaded runoff observations for calibration jobs.
• README.md explains how to inspect or rerun the package.

If you only need the completed result, start with Runmodel/output/. If you want to understand or modify the model, open Runmodel/.

Freedom After Download

Hydro2go is designed to give you a working starting point, not to lock you into a hidden workflow.

After download, you can:

• inspect the model configuration;
• check the prepared inputs;
• compare simulated output with observations;
• modify model parameters;
• rerun the model locally or on your own computing system;
• use Hydro2go's automatic calibration result as a baseline for your own experiments.

This is the intended balance: the platform handles the repetitive setup, while the user keeps control of the model and the interpretation.

Questions or a basin that needs special handling? Use the Contact me link in Hydro2go.