Policy note. This handbook is a living document and does not replace official NMSU, College of Engineering, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Graduate School, funding-agency, immigration, employment, or university policies. When conflicts arise, official policies and written funding/appointment letters take precedence.
Curated Tool Catalog
For a fuller, categorized directory of research tools — AI/ML, geospatial, remote sensing, hydrologic modeling, figures, writing, reproducibility, and HPC/cloud — see the lab catalog:
- hsi-lab-curated-research-tools — Curated, one-line directory of tools and data portals for hydrosystems research, organized into twelve categories.
The sections below are a short orientation to the tools used most day to day.
Scientific Computing
- Python: general analysis, modeling, automation, and visualization.
- R: statistics, hydrology packages, and publication graphics.
- Julia: numerical computing and optimization when useful.
- MATLAB: legacy workflows, teaching, or collaborator-specific models.
Geospatial Work
- QGIS for desktop GIS.
- GDAL for command-line raster and vector processing.
- xarray, rasterio, rioxarray, geopandas, and pyproj for Python geospatial workflows.
- Google Earth Engine for large-scale remote-sensing analysis when project terms allow it.
Hydrology and Water Systems
- VIC and related hydrologic modeling tools.
- EPANET or water distribution modeling tools when relevant.
- CDO and NCO for NetCDF processing.
Writing and Collaboration
- LaTeX or Overleaf for manuscripts with heavy equations or multi-author workflows.
- Zotero for reference management.
- GitHub for version control and collaboration.
Choosing Tools
Prefer tools that are reproducible, well documented, actively maintained, and appropriate for the project’s collaborators.