Welcome
Dr.
David R. Maidment, Director
Center for Research in Water Resources
University of Texas
at Austin
Each year since 1994, we have presented a GIS Hydro PreConference
Seminar at the ESRI User Conference.
Initially, we documented the content and background to this seminar with
a workbook distributed at the seminar, then in 1998, we switched to producing a
CD-ROM and in 2005, we switched to documenting everything on a seminar web
site. The inventory of these CD-ROMs
and web sites from past GIS Hydro seminars beginning in 1998 can be seen at http://www.crwr.utexas.edu/archive.shtml
Preparing this information has been a valuable opportunity for our CRWR
research team to each year document the latest findings, data and tools from
our research program in a form that is accessible and usable by the GIS in
Water Resources community. And so it is
again this year.
GIS Hydro 2006 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, presentations made at the GIS Hydro ’06 Preconference
seminar, the classroom exercises that we used in the 2005 version of our GIS in Water Resources class (for which I
thank David Tarboton of Utah State University for his contributions), and
the term projects that resulted from this class at UT Austin.
- Arc Hydro — this
section describes the current Arc Hydro data model and tools and provides
a link for the latest version of the toolset and supporting documents prepared
by ESRI. 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 Tommy Dewald
at 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. This section concludes with a pair of exercises on
application of Arc Hydro to the Pearl
River Basin in Mississippi by
Louis Wasson, of Mississippi
State University,
which come from a one-day Arc Hydro short course that Louis and I taught
together in Jackson, Mississippi in April 2006.
- GIS and HIS – this section derives from our work with
the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science,
Inc, (CUAHSI), an organization representing 109 US universities which is
funded by the National Science Foundation to develop infrastructure and
services to support the advancement of hydrologic research and education
at US universities. I am the leader
of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System project. This effort is focused on the
representation of hydrologic observation data, that is, rainfall,
streamflow, water quality, groundwater levels, and climate, using
relational databases and web services, in which GIS is used as a map front
end to geospatially unify sources of water information for the
nation. This is an exciting and
challenging new aspect of the use of GIS in Water Resources, that will advance
significantly in future years though a new customization of ArcGIS Server
9.2 called Arc Hydro Server that is being worked on by Dean Djokic and his team at ESRI. I want to acknowledge the contributions
to our HIS work of our technology partner, the San Diego Supercomputer
Center (Ilya Zaslavsky,
David Valentine and Blair Jennings), and colleagues in other academic
institutions (David Tarboton from Utah State University, Michael Piasecki at Drexel University, and Jon Goodall from Duke University).
- Space-Time — this
section describes our on-going work to add a time dimension to
ArcGIS. 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. 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 and real-time weather data services from Unidata. We show how to access and use weather
model data and also how to transform it between spherical and spheroidal datums. Cedric
David and Tim Whiteaker have made significant contributions to our
understanding of this subject, and I would like to acknowledge the
contributions of our colleagues at Unidata, John
Caron, Jeff Weber and Ben Domenico, to this
work. 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. Shane Walker is
developing a geodatabase design for the FEMA Floodplain Mapping program.
- Instream Flows – this
is a new section this year documenting Venkatesh Merwade’s
work on river channel morphology and Eric Hersh’s work on instream flow
characterization. Venkatesh has
just left CRWR to take up a faculty position in the Civil Engineering
Department of Purdue University so we say farewell to him after five
productive years at CRWR where he received his PhD and served as a
post-doc.
- 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. Ernest To is
supporting the bacterial load work with Monte Carlo
simulation.
There are many people whom I'd like to thank for help in producing this
CD-ROM. First among them are Tyler Jantzen and Eric Hersh, the CRWR
graduate students who managed the assembly of the materials on this year's
CD-ROM. Other students and post-docs whose work is presented here include
Cedric David, Nate Johnson, Sergio Martinez, Venkatesh Merwade, Carlos Patino, Gil Strassberg,
Ernest To, Shane Walker, Jessica Watts, and Tim Whiteaker. I want
also to acknowledge the contribution to the Arc Hydro effort by Dean Djokic, Christine Dartiguenave,
Joe Breman, Steve Kopp, Clint Brown, Scott Morehouse,
Jack Dangermond, 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 an 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