GIS for large-scale watershed observational data model

Because integrated management of a river basin requires the development of models that are used for many purposes, e.g., to assess risks and possible mitigation of droughts and floods, manage water rights, assess water quality, and simply to understand the hydrology of the basin, the development of a relational database from which models can access the various data needed to describe the systems being modeled is fundamental. In order for this concept to be useful and widely applicable, however, it must have a standard design. The recently developed ArcHydro data model facilitates the organization of data according to the “basin” principle and allows access to hydrologic information by models. The development of a basin-scale relational database for the Rio Grande/Bravo basin implemented in a Geographic Information System is one of the contributions of this research. This geodatabase represents the first major attempt to establish a more complete understanding of the basin as a whole, including spatial and temporal information obtained from the United States of America and Mexico. Difficulties in processing raster datasets over large regions are studied in this research. One of the most important contributions is the application of a Raster-Network Regionalization technique, which utilizes raster-based analysis at the subregional scale in an efficient manner and combines the resulting subregional vector datasets into a regional database. Another important contribution of this research is focused on implementing a robust structure for handling huge temporal data sets related to monitoring points such as hydrometric and climatic stations, reservoir inlets and outlets, water rights, etc. For the Rio Grande study area, the ArcHydro format is applied to the historical information collected in order to include and relate these time series to the monitoring points in the geodatabase. Its standard time series format is changed to include a relationship to the agency from which data is obtained. Since ArcHydro was designed to store hydrologic GIS data in a manner conducive to data export for model use, a toolset is proposed to exchange temporal information between the Geodatabase and the Data Storage System (HEC-DSS).