Project Initialization

hydro-param uses a project directory structure to organize data, configs, and outputs. This makes each project a reproducible modeling artifact documenting the full provenance chain.

Create a project

hydro-param init my-watershed

This creates:

my-watershed/
├── .hydro-param           # Project marker
├── configs/
│   └── pipeline.yml       # Template pipeline configuration
├── data/
│   ├── fabrics/           # Target polygon files
│   ├── climate/           # Climate datasets
│   ├── land_cover/        # Land cover datasets
│   ├── soils/             # Soil datasets
│   ├── topography/        # DEM and terrain datasets
│   └── ...                # Other categories
├── output/                # Pipeline results
├── models/                # Model exports
└── .gitignore

Re-initialize

Use --force to refresh an existing project. This creates missing directories and updates the marker, but never overwrites pipeline.yml:

hydro-param init --force

Project detection

hydro-param detects whether you're inside a project by walking up the directory tree looking for the .hydro-param marker file (similar to how git finds .git). When inside a project, commands like datasets download automatically route files to the correct data/<category>/ subdirectory.