Water management in the Netherlands applies to a dense network of surface waters for discharge, storage and distribution, serving highly valuable land-use. National and regional water authorities develop long-term plans for sustainable water use and safety under changing climate conditions. The decisions about investments on adaptive measures are based on analysis supported by the Netherlands Hydrological Instrument NHI based on the best available data and state-of-the-art technology and developed through collaboration between national research institutes. The NHI consists of various physical models at appropriate temporal and spatial scales for all parts of the water system. Intelligent connectors provide transfer between different scales and fast computation, by coupling model codes at a deep level in software. A workflow and version management system guarantees consistency in the data, software, computations and results. The NHI is freely available to hydrologists via an open web interface that enables exchange of all data and tools. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).