GIS can be a powerful tool for developing solutions for water resources problems -- for assessing water quality, determining water availability, preventing flooding, understanding the natural environment, and managing water resources on a local or regional scale. The advent of ArcGIS created an opportunity to design a new way of representing water resources data. The result is Arc Hydro.

Developed by leaders from industry, government, and academia, Arc Hydro is a data structure that provides the capacity to link hydrologic data to water resources modeling and decision-making methods. Now hydrologic water resource models and information systems can be more closely integrated with GIS.

This book presents Arc Hydro concepts, components, and applications. It describes how to:

• Create hydro networks of rivers and streams
• Define drainage areas linked via relationships to a hydro network
• Represent channel shape using three-dimensional models
• Connect geospatial features to time series measurements recorded at gauging sites

In the future, hydrologists will increasingly rely on GIS data, and Arc Hydro provides a standardized way of describing those data so that they can be used consistently and efficiently to solve a wide variety of water resource problems at any spatial scale.

The CD-ROM included with this book contains instructions to help you start using Arc Hydro, plus a set of tools that populate the attributes of the features in the data framework, interconnect features in different data layers, support hydrologic analysis, and more. The CD also includes slide show resources for teachers and sample data from the Guadalupe River basin in Texas on which you can apply the tools.

About the editor:

David R. Maidment is the world’s leading authority on water resources and GIS. He is director of the Center for Research in Water Resources of the University of Texas at Austin. He is the editor of Hydrologic and Hydraulic Modeling Support with GIS and Arc Hydro: GIS for Water Resources