Developing A Hydrologic Information System: Towards Promoting Sustainable Standardization

Water quantity and quality monitoring plays a key role towards the development of a sustainable water sector. The required infrastructure needed to monitor and manage surface and groundwater systems are often lacking particularly in developing countries. When available, water quantity and quality data are invariably fragmented, intermittent, not shared, with deficient metadata, and stored in formats that hinder establishing seamless coupling with hydrological models. Most data are saved locally with little attention placed on defining and maintaining metadata on the collection protocols, geographic referencing, measurement accuracy, resolution, detection limits, and data censorship. These limitations present serious challenges in reaching sound water management strategies. To alleviate these shortcomings, a Hydrologic Information System (HIS) based on the ArcHydro data model was developed using the country of Lebanon as a prototype. The HIS centralized available hydrological and water resources information; coupled spatial coverage with respective time series data on flow, water demand, meteorology, and water quality; and standardized metadata. Additionally, the system was structured to support hydrologic modeling and water resources analysis. A loose coupling was also integrated between the system and the Water Evaluation And Planning (WEAP) hydrological model and tested on the Upper Litani River Basin. The framework encompassed the ability to export back model simulation results and incorporate them within the HIS as time series records. The developed HIS system has since been adopted as a data repository for other water related projects in Lebanon and has helped identify key gaps in existing data and set monitoring priorities