Mr. Mohamad Bakir
College of Water Resources & Environment, Hohai University
Nanjing (210024), China
Email: [email protected]
The last few years have witnessed an enormous interest in application of GIS in hydrology and water resources. The GIS technology has the ability to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, and visualize the georeferenced data. On the other hand hydrology is inherently spatial and distributed hydrologic models have large data requirements. The integration of hydrology and GIS is there for quite natural. The integration involves three major components: 1- Spatial data construction .2-Integration of spatial model layers .3- GIS and model interface. Hydrological modelling is a powerful technique in the planning and development of integrated approach for management of water resources.
GIS can assist in design, calibration, modification and comparison of models. GIS has influenced the development and implementation of hydrologic models at several different levels, and it provides representations of these spatial features of the Earth, while hydrologic modeling is concerned with the flow of water and its constituents over the land surface and in the subsurface environment. GIS and hydrological modelling can be considered as complimentary. GIS could benefit from the temporal modelling capabilities of hydrological models and hydrologic models can benefit from the spatial modelling capabilities of GIS. GIS with its upcoming advanced technology has been a great asset to Hydrologic Modeling. The goal of this paper is to introduce GIS and discusses a range of its application in hydrological modeling, and to outline the rational basis for the linkage between GIS and hydrologic modeling, to indicate the type of model that could be incorporated within GIS and which are best left as independent analytical tools linked to GIS for data input and display of results; to examine the object oriented data model as an intermediate link between the spatial relational model inherent in GIS and the data models used in hydrology; and to look at some future directions of hydrologic models that have not been possible before but that might now be feasible with the advent of GIS.
