SJRWMD Arc Hydro: Community-Based Data Sharing for Water Resources Modeling

Initially used for map-making, GIS has increasingly been used for data analysis and decision support. As GIS technology has evolved, it has become capable of storing and manipulating in logical and consistent ways the foundation for water resources decision support — namely, hydrologic information systems (HIS). HIS systems provide a common platform that can be built, explored, and edited by communities of users with a common interest in the water resources of a region. The St. Johns River Water Management District's (SJRWMD) Arc Hydro solution is a developing example of such an HIS. This paper will describe the process of developing the SJRWMD Arc Hydro solution. One of five water management districts in Florida, SJRWMD is responsible for managing water resources in all or part of 18 counties in northeast and east-central Florida. As such, several parallel and continuing modeling efforts exist to generate understanding of its water resources. One such effort is that of the surface water quality monitoring (SWQM) program. The SWQM program is responsible for assessment of water quality at 73 monitoring sites throughout the area. To directly meet its needs for water quality modeling and explore the use of GIS for community-based data sharing and editing, the SWQM program has been instrumental in the development of SJRWMD Arc Hydro, a prototype Arc Hydro-based database and associated software tools. Still in its initial stages, the solution comprises an enhanced version of the well-known Arc Hydro geo-database schema and a custom set of tools that facilitate the process of database building, maintenance, and exploration. The solution provides three inter-related sets of functionality: 1) an inventory function spatially references models and their results routinely produced by SJRWMD to an Arc Hydro back-bone and provides for a district-wide, spatially integrated, view of modeling and analysis, 2) a disconnected editing function allows users to check out and check back in a portion of the Arc Hydro geodatabase that can be used either for editing or as a spatial basis for modeling efforts, and 3) a summary function produces geo-spatial reports such as model inventories and water quality trends in a district-wide context.