Scientific visualization typically requires large amounts of custom coding that obscures the underlying principles of the work and makes it difficult to reproduce the results. Here we describe how the new HoloViews Python package, when combined with the IPython Notebook and a plotting library, provides a rich, interactive interface for flexible and nearly code-free visualization of your results while storing a full record of the process for later reproduction.HoloViews provides a set of general-purpose data structures that allow you to pair your data with a small amount of metadata. These data structures are then used by a separate plotting system to render your data interactively, e.g. within the IPython Notebook environment, revealing even complex data in publication-quality form without requiring custom plotting code for each figure.HoloViews also provides powerful containers that allow you to organize this data for analysis, embedding it whatever multidimensional continuous or discrete space best characterizes it. The resulting workflow allows you to focus on exploring, analyzing, and understanding your data and results, while leading directly to an exportable recipe for reproducible research.

Building environmental simulation workflows is typically a slow process involving multiple proprietary desktop tools that do not interoperate well. In this work, we demonstrate building flexible, lightweight workflows entirely in Jupyter notebooks. We demonstrate these capabilities through examples in hydrology and hydrodynamics using the AdH (Adaptive Hydraulics) and GSSHA (Gridded Surface Subsurface Hydrologic Analysis) simulators. The goal of this work is to provide a set of tools that work well together and with the existing scientific python ecosystem, that can be used in browser based environments and that can easily be reconfigured and repurposed as needed to rapidly solve specific emerging issues such as hurricanes or dam failures. As part of this work, extensive improvements were made to several generalpurpose open source packages, including support for annotating and editing plots and maps in Bokeh and HoloViews, rendering large triangular meshes and regridding large raster data in HoloViews, GeoViews, and Datashader, and widget libraries for Param. In addition, two new open source projects are being released, one for triangular mesh generation (Filigree) and one for environmental data access (Quest).