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 2007 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 ’07 Preconference
seminar, the classroom exercises that we used in the 2006 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 Nishesh Mehta
of CRWR 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.
- 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 112 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 HIS 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 Tom Whitenack), and
colleagues in other academic institutions (David Tarboton,
Jeff Horsburgh and Kim Schreuders
from Utah State University, Michael Piasecki and
Bora Beran at Drexel University, and Jon Goodall from the University of South Carolina).
- Space-Time — this
section describes our on-going work to add a time dimension to
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. Virginia Smith has
illustrated these capabilities in these materials. 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.
Simulation model outputs from the Water Rights Analysis Package
(WRAP) are being researched by Clark Siler and Tim Whiteaker to see how to use mapping, animation and
graphing in ArcGIS to visualize water supply
reliability in Texas
river basins. Ernest To is using 3D kriging to
examine the variations of salinity concentration in Corpus Christi Bay.
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.
- Environmental Flows — this
section introduces the work of Eric Hersh who is
studying how to estimate the requirements for environmental flows for Texas streams and
rivers. His work integrates
hydrology, water quality, geomorphology and biology of streams and
rivers. An additional component of
this subject is supplied by Dr Venkatesh Merwade’s work on river channel morphology – Venkatesh is now with the Dept of Civil Engineering at
Purdue University.
- Continental Water Dynamics
— this is a new endeavor this year being carried out by PhD student, Cédric David, inspired in part by the NHDPlus dataset.
NHDPlus contains 2.3 million river and
water body reaches of average length 2 km, each of which having an
associated catchment of area 3 km2. We start with the question “can we
compute the flow of water simultaneously in all the river and water body
reaches of the nation”. We are
also inspired by the expansion of “petascale
computing” for which our Texas
Advanced Computation
Center is presently
building a supercomputer with 50,000 parallel processors. In this work, we are collaborating with
Dave Gochis at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research.
- Groundwater
— this section reports on the evolving development by Dr 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 Steve Grisé of ESRI to this effort. We are this year holding a separate PreConference Seminar on Groundwater and we are
working on a new book on the Arc Hydro Groundwater Data Model. Dr Jone’s
group is going to take over the development of a new toolset for
groundwater data analysis in ArcGIS.
- Water Quality — this section describes the work of PhD student
Stephanie Johnson into Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) computations for
water pollution assessment.
Stephanie has demonstrated that it is possible to use CUAHSI web
services to quickly integrate streamflow and
pollutant concentrations at sampling sites and thus simplify the
development of Load Duration Curves, an important component of TMDL
studies.
There are many people whom I'd like to thank for help in producing this
CD-ROM. First among them is Clark Siler, the CRWR graduate student who
managed the assembly of the materials on this year's GIS Hydro 07
website. Other CRWR students and graduates whose work is presented here
include Cedric David, Eric Hersh, Stephanie Johnson, Nishesh
Mehta, Venkatesh Merwade, Carlos Patino,
Virginia Smith, Gil Strassberg, Ernest To, and Tim
Whiteaker. I want also to acknowledge the contribution to the Arc
Hydro effort by Dean Djokic, Zichuan
Ye, Christine Dartiguenave, 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
Hussein M. Alharthy Centennial Chair in 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