TSTool Case Study - Riverside Technology, inc.

Challenge

Extreme Drought Conditions

One of the impacts of climate change is that drought conditions are becoming more severe. Water managers at both the local and state levels are finding it difficult to determine water availability because of these drought conditions.

Solution

Riverside computed unimpaired flows for the State of Georgia, and developed a website for sharing the information with project participants.

Riverside Goes to Work

The State of Georgia has experienced severe drought conditions, leading to a greater need for understanding and optimizing water supply within the State. Riverside Technology, inc. (Riverside), as a subcontractor to ARCADIS, provided water resources engineering services related to data collection, quality control, and estimation of unimpaired (natural) flows for Georgia’s rivers.)

This effort utilized software from the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC) and the TSTool software developed by Riverside. Input and analysis results time series are stored in HEC-DSS files.

Riverside also implemented an interactive web mapping application to view spatial layers and provide access to the time series. ESRI’s ArcGIS Server provides access to the spatial data. The ESRI JavaScript API was used to implement the map interface for web browsers.

Results

The time series processing components in TSTool were utilized in a web application to read HECDSS files and provide plot images and time series data for interactive plot web pages. This allows simple access to data as well as more complicated processing such as summing demand time series in a specified region. Template workflow and plot definition files were implemented to allow new data analysis and output products to be added to the site with few or no software changes.