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Flood Forecasting for the Buffalo Bayou using
CRWR-Pre-Pro and HEC-HMS
By Seth R. Ahrens, M.S.E.
ABSTRACT
The Center for Research in Water Resources
(CRWR) at the University of Texas at Austin over the past few years
has spent significant effort developing CRWR-PrePro. This package, which
runs off of a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) platform, provides
a link between GIS data and the Hydrologic Engineering Center«s (HEC)
Hydrologic Modeling System (HMS). This project focuses on the application
of CRWR-PrePro and HMS to generate a hydrologic model of the Buffalo
Bayou watershed, which is west of Houston, Texas along Interstate 10.
In October, 1994, a severe storm event occurred over the Houston metropolitan
area, dropping rainfall totals ranging from 5 to 40+ inches. Since the
National Weather Service had recently installed Next Generation Weather
Radar (NEXRAD) equipment in Houston prior to this event, high-resolution
(1 km 2 ) rainfall data were available. These rainfall data were processed
using a new Avenue-based version of the UNIX code (GridParm) the HEC
had used previously to create the necessary rainfall data file for HMS.
In addition, 30-meter DEM data were acquired via the internet and analyzed
by CRWR-PrePro to complete a sub-watershed delineation of the Buffalo
Bayou in the area of interest. Using the results from the new GridParm
procedure and the output from CRWR-PrePro, a HMS model of the Buffalo
Bayou was created. Results from the model indicate that the use of 30-meter
DEM data is inadequate when dealing with a place as flat as Houston.
Higher resolution terrain data, such as LIDAR, would presumably work
much better. Nonetheless, this project revealed the benefits of using
CRWR-PrePro to link GIS with HMS.
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