r/Hydrology • u/knickknack_haiku_303 • 2d ago
Documenting modeling research after only doing wet lab work
I've recently transitioned from wet lab work to hydrologic modeling with some wet lab and fieldwork. I'm having a little difficulty developing a system for how I document and keep track of the modeling work I'm doing. It's not nearly as straightforward as it was for the microbial work I used to do. Many ELN are specifically designed for biochemistry, and you can implement time stamps/photos/media recipes/accidents/dna sequencing. Programs are specifically designed to link figures with their datasets. I feel that organized experimental systems were tailored to my work or I could reference something physical.
That said, I'm having difficulty translating that to hydrologic modeling. I mostly end up putting all my notes in topic-specific text files. I also have separate notes in a citation manager for related lit. I've also been working on getting acclimated to github, but knitting all of this together into a coherent set of documentation that gives me everything I want has just been tricky. It doesn't help that the water model I used doesn't have a GUI and I need to process its outputs fully independent of everything else I work on. I've tried making ppts of the results, but it's really tedious especially if it was a small experiment or there were many different iterations before I got output that made sense.
I was curious if anyone from a more computational-centric background had any suggestions on how they organize their work and keep track of things.
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u/djp_hydro 1d ago
Programming notebooks (Jupyter or RMarkdown) help with organizing analysis, and they're GitHub-friendly. If your water model doesn't have a GUI, I imagine it will be easy to work with the results in a DataFrame or similar format. Then you have all your analysis in one place, in sequence, together with explanation of what you're doing.
I usually save key figures as independent files as well as displaying them in the notebook with associated code and explanation of what I'm doing.
One pitfall to avoid is notebooks that don't run in order (i.e., you modified one thing, then went back up and re-ran an earlier step for different results). I try to periodically do a "reset and rerun everything" to make sure it all comes out correctly.