GIS for Water Resources

The development of GIS-based tools and data has given engineers and scientists a vastly improved ability to solve water resource concerns.  Jones Edmunds staff remain at the forefront of this technology with outstanding proficiency in GIS software, data modeling, and customized application development.  At Jones Edmunds, the strengths of the water resources and the GIS team combine to deliver a complete solution to meet water resources management requirements.

Services Provided Include:

• Hydrologic Analysis
• Hydraulic Analysis
• Database Design
• Flood Zone Mapping
• Water Supply Investigation
• Water Quality Analysis
• Dispersion/Concentration Modeling
• Water Distribution Modeling/Planning
• Groundwater Studies
• NPDES Permitting
• TMDL Evaluations
• Sedimentation and Erosion Assessments
• Wellhead Protection

ArcHydro Tools

To optimize the hydrology and hydraulics (H&H) modeling work we perform for SWFMWD in support of the FEMA Map Modernization program, our staff has developed an extensive set of tools in the VB.Net environment.  These tools standardize and automate traditional tasks such as model initialization, extraction of H&H parameters, and exchange between model and GIS.  The tools are developed as a series of interfaces to perform watershed parameterization and floodplain analysis and designed to complement the existing ESRI ArcHydro Tools.  Each tool is designed to automatically populate a customized ArcHydro geodatabase, vastly streamlining the time necessary to capture this information for H&H models.  The following are two examples of hydro tools:

Mixed Catchment Delineation Tool

The catchment delineation tools generate boundary polygons for closed and dendritic sub-basins from detailed Digital Terrain Models (DTM) while checking for storage requirements.  Storage volumes are determined by the stage at which surface flow exits the catchment.  Delineated sub-basins not meeting the specification are merged or split according to engineering judgment and additional GIS tools.

Curve number tool

The curve number tool determines the area weighted runoff curve number for catchments using an enhanced version of the TR-55 method.  Directly connected impervious areas are removed from the runoff curve number estimated from soils and land use.  The percentage of directly connected imperious area is reported per catchment as well.