Welcome

Dr. David R. Maidment, Director
Center for Research in Water Resources
University of Texas at Austin

This year, 2004, we celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the GIS Hydro Preconference Seminar for the ESRI User Conference, which we first presented at the 1994 User Conference in Palm Springs, and we've done it annually since.   When I think back on those early days when we reproduced a printed book of images and AML's and look at what we can do now with websites and CD-ROM's I'm struck by how much electronic communication has advanced in the last 10 years.   There was a life before Powerpoint!  

This year, we've put together the supporting materials in for the Seminar in a slightly different way than before — we have built a Seminar website at http://www.crwr.utexas.edu/gis/gishydro04/ that contains the materials we are presenting at the Seminar, including the powerpoint presentations, computer code, sample data and explanatory exercises for the tools and methods described.   After the User Conference is over, ESRI will manufacture this as the GIS Hydro 2004 CD-ROM.   In this way, all the last minute aspects of the preparation for the Seminar will be included on the website and CD-ROM.  In the past, we've had to master the CD-ROM a month in advance of the conference so some of what we were presenting at the Seminar was developed after the CD-ROM was manufactured.   We think this new approach will result in a more complete and up to date presentation of our materials.

GIS Hydro 2004 has some features similar to its predecessors, namely the digital Classroom where we present the exercises used during my GIS in Water Resources graduate course in Fall 2003, and the term papers produced by students in that course, and the digital Library where we present digital copies of reports and theses of research pertaining to the application of GIS in Water Resources.  GIS Hydro 2004 has five sections, the first of which contains the regularly appearing information, and the remainder reporting on new lines of research and development for this year:

• Introduction —  this section contains this introduction, the digital classroom and library and copies of powerpoint presentations illustrating various subjects contained on the CD-ROM.
• Arc Hydro —  this section provides describes the current Arc Hydro data model and tools and provides a link for the latest version of the toolset.   Dr Dean Djokic is the leader of the water resources applications group at ESRI and he is presenting this section of the seminar
• Groundwater —  this section reports on the evolving development of a groundwater data model for ArcGIS and both a draft geodatabase and toolset for manipulation of groundwater features are included. I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Dr Norman Jones of Brigham Young University to this effort.
• Hydrologic Modeling —  this section describes how we are linking ArcGIS and Arc Hydro with various kinds of hydrologic models for flooding, water availability, water quality and instream flow requirements in stream channels.  It features the "Map to Map" application (from a Nexrad rainfall map to a flood inundation map) which integrates the HEC-HMS and HEC-RAS models using the Arc 9 Model Builder.  ESRI used "Map to Map" this summer in more than 50 rollout seminars across the US for ArcGIS version 9.
• Space-Time — this section describes our going work to add a time dimension to Arc GIS.  It includes a set of tools for plotting time series stored in Arc Hydro format, and an evolving set of capabilities to link hydrology with the atmospheric sciences by using the netCDF file format within ArcGIS.

There are many people whom I'd like to thank for help in producing this CD-ROM.  First among them  is Jon Goodall, the CRWR graduate student who managed the assembly of the materials on this year's CD-ROM.  Other students whose work is presented here include Alicia Fogg, Nate Johnson, Sergio Martinez, Venkatesh Merwade, Carlos Patino, Oscar Robayo and Gil Strassberg.   I want also to acknowledge the contribution to the Arc Hydro effort by Dean Djokic, Joe Breman and their colleagues at ESRI Redlands, who have been continuously supportive of the advancements we have been making.

I hope you find this information helpful in your work.   If you have any comments or questions, please contact the individuals given in each section of the material or send and enquiry to me directly.

David R. Maidment
Engineering Foundation Professor of Civil Engineering
Director, Center for Research in Water Resources
The University of Texas at Austin
maidment@mail.utexas.edu
http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/maidment/home.html