My colleague and I recently published a technical note in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) on automating a hydrodynamic model of the Delaware Estuary.  The automation process harvests data from the internet, processes it into a model input file, and runs the model overnight.  You can see the abstract at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jawr.12185/abstract