Welcome
Each year since 1994, we have presented a GIS Hydro PreConference Seminar at the ESRI User Conference. From workbooks to CD-ROMs to the World Wide Web, we've been documenting the content and background of the seminar every year - you can check out the archives at http://www.crwr.utexas.edu/archive.shtml.
In support of this year's theme of Designing and Building Water Web Services, GIS Hydro 2009 has two sections. The first section contains the regularly appearing information and the second reports on new lines of research and development in the field of Water Web Services.
- Introduction - this introduction, presentations made at the GIS Hydro '09 Preconference seminar, the classroom exercises that we used in the 2008 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. Also, select exercises and term projects from our 2009 course on Statistics in Water Resources are included.
- What is HIS? - derived 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, an effort focused on the representation of hydrologic observation data, that is, rainfall, streamflow, water quality, groundwater levels, biological, 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.
- Storing and Publishing Water Observation Data Services - information useful for people who want to publish water observations data online. The CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System provides web services, tools, standards and procedures that enhance access to more and better data for hydrologic analysis. The system consists of three major components: HIS Servers for publishing data, HIS Central for registering public data services on HIS Servers, and Users who can access to HIS through their application of choice or by special HIS applications.
- Using an HIS - an example application of CUAHSI water web services in action. In this case, an automated tool is presented which incorporates USGS daily streamflow data and Texas water quality data to develop Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDL) for bacteria. This tool exploits the hydrological information system technology and demonstrates the utility of HIS in helping scientists gain insight to common environmental problems.
- What is Service-Oriented Architecture? - a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a design model which relies on a collection of loosely coupled self-contained services that communicate with each other through the internet and can be called from multiple clients in a standard fashion. The CUAHSI HIS distributed model has, at its core, a collection of WaterOneFlow web services communicated through WaterML between servers and clients following a standard protocol.
- GIS Portal Toolkit and HydroViewer - in an ongoing effort in conjunction with CUAHSI, ESRI is deploying a GIS Portal Toolkit and developing a customized HydroViewer. While still under development, it is anticipated that these tools will serve as both a registry for your data and a portal to access the data of others. ESRI is currently extending the GIS Portal Toolkit to support the registration of CUAHSI HIS WaterOneFlow web services. This customized GIS Portal Toolkit will be used in conjunction with another application in development called HydroViewer to enable mass-harvesting of time series data from registered services.
- EPA WATERS Web Services - an overview of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Watershed Assessment, Tracking & Environmental Results (WATERS) system, designed to unite water quality data from multiple EPA programs for easier data access. Included are a Reach Address Database, an online EnviroMapper for Water, and a series of tools to query data by Reach Index.
There are many people whom I'd like to thank for help in producing this CD-ROM. James Seppi and Eric Hersh are the CRWR graduate students who managed the assembly of the GIS Hydro 09 website. Other CRWR researchers whose work is presented here include Aparna Boddupalli, Cedric David, Bryan Enslein, Wendy Harrison, Mutao Cherish Huang, Stephanie Johnson, Kate Marney, Fernando Salas, Clark Siler, Ernest To, and Tim Whiteaker. I want also to acknowledge the contributions by Darren Baird, Dean Djokic, Zichuan Ye, Christine Dartiguenave, Christine Eggers, Steve Grise, Steve Kopp, Nawajish Noman, Zhumei Qian, 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