Welcome

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

In past years for the GIS Hydro Preconference Seminar we produced a CD-ROM for distribution to the seminar participants and as an alternative, created a web site where the contents of the CD-ROM were also displayed.   Now that internet access has improved to the point where downloading files from websites has become routine, we have decided to switch over to just publishing a web site for the Seminar.    This also allows us to add the contents of the powerpoint presentations used in the seminar after it is over so that a complete record of the materials is available.

GIS Hydro 2005 has some features similar to its predecessors, namely  the exercises used during my GIS in Water Resources graduate course in Fall 2004, and the term papers produced by students in that course. GIS Hydro 2005 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.   In this section there are also materials contributed by Alan Rea and colleagues from the USGS and EPA about NHDPlus, a new version of the National Hydrography Dataset that links stream network reaches with small catchments defined around them from the National Elevation Dataset.  
• Space-Time — this section describes our going work to add a time dimension to Arc GIS.  It includes a toolbar for plotting time series from Arc Hydro or from the National Water Information System directly in ArcMap, and a set of tools for doing space-time transformations of data in ArcGIS.   The Danish Hydraulic Institute has produced its own DHI Temporal Analyst, which links to the Arc Hydro description of time series.   In ArcGIS 9.2, ESRI has added support for multidimensional data in netCDF format as a capability in ArcGIS, and has significantly improved the ability to do time series plots and time-space animations in ArcGIS.   Steve Kopp is presenting this information in the PreConference Seminar.  This will open up a large set of new data sources to ArcGIS users, among which is the DayMet dataset from NCAR.   At CRWR, Carlos Patino has built a very large Arc Hydro time series dataset for the Rio Grande basin, currently numbering more than 5 million records, and Sergio Martinez is studying how Arc Hydro and HEC-RAS can be combined to determine the accuracy of measurements of stage recording for the South Florida Water Management District.
• Groundwater —  this section reports on the evolving development by Gil Strassberg 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, and Randy Keller of the University of Texas at El Paso to this effort.
• Water Quality —  this section describes two investigations to do water quality modeling in ArcGIS, one by Carrie Gibson which uses a Schematic Processor to route bacterial loads through watershed and into a water body, and a second by Jessica Watts and Nate Johnson which links ArcGIS and HSPF.   These models are being developed to support TMDL studies in Texas.

There are many people whom I'd like to thank for help in producing this CD-ROM.  First among them  is Carrie Gibson, 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 Jon Goodall, Nate Johnson, Sergio Martinez, Venkatesh Merwade, Carlos Patino, Gil Strassberg, Shane Walker and Jessica Watts.   I want also to acknowledge the contribution to the Arc Hydro effort by Dean Djokic, Christine Dartiguenave, Joe Breman, Steve Kopp 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