GIS Hydro '99 - Hydrologic Engineering Center

Applying GIS to Hydrologic and Hydraulic Engineering

The Hydrologic Engineering Center's Cooperative Efforts with ESRI

The Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC) is an office of the US Army Corps of Engineers established to support the nation in its water resources management responsibilities by increasing the Corps technical capability in hydrologic engineering and water resources planning and management. By means of programs in research, training, planning analysis, and technical assistance, HEC incorporates state-of-the-art procedures and techniques into manuals and comprehensive computer programs. The products are developed for the Corps; however, they are available to the public.

The Hydrologic Engineering Center entered into a cooperative research and development agreement with ESRI in January 1999. The goals of this agreement include:

• developing an understanding of potential GIS applications, data, and software to support applications in hydrologic engineering and planning analysis, with emphasis on GIS applications in support of the HEC family of software.
• coordinating existing Arc/Info and ArcView HEC-RAS (river hydraulics/flood inundation mapping) GIS applications software, and cooperating on new river hydraulics GIS software.
• developing new GIS applications to support watershed modeling (precipitation/runoff) programs.
• exploring other opportunities for cooperation in such areas as geographic data structures for water resources modeling and analysis, flood damage analysis, and spatial hydrologic data products.

Software Products Developed by HEC and ESRI

Software products developed under the HEC/ESRI agreement will be distributed and supported by HEC and will be available to the public under the same distribution policies governing other HEC products.

Products under development include:

• HEC-geoRAS - A set of Arc/Info macros designed to allow hydraulic engineers to develop HEC-RAS river hydraulics models using digital terrain models (as TINs) and other geographic data in Arc/Info, and to develop inundation polygons and depth grids from the results of HEC-RAS simulations. HEC-geoRAS has been released by HEC and is available on the HEC software distribution web site.
• AVRAS - An ArcView extension that adds functions like those in HEC-geoRAS to ArcView with 3D Analyst. AVRAS was developed at ESRI with assistance from HEC staff. HEC will distribute and support a revised version of AVRAS as HEC-geoRAS (ArcView version) starting in the fall of 1999. The current version of AVRAS is included on this CD.
• HEC-geoHMS - An ArcView extension to support development of hydrologic models with HEC-HMS. HEC-geoHMS will delineate basins and streams from digital elevation models, extract a limited set hydrologic modeling parameters from the DEMs and other supported data layers, and write parameter files that can be imported directly to HEC-HMS. HEC-geoHMS is scheduled for beta testing in August and September of 1999 with a version 1.0 release anticipated in December 1999.