IAWD member Mozaika works at the forefront digitalization in the water sector. We gladly share their contributions and insights. Today, they take a close look at Geographic Information Systems and their suitability for advanced water resources management.

What is GIS?

GIS – Geographic Information System - are computer systems that analyze and display geographically referenced information. They are used to capture, store, check and display data related to positions on earth’s surface. Many kinds of data can be shown on maps, such as streets, buildings, and vegetation. This enables people to more easily see, analyze and understand patterns and relationships between geo-referenced objects.

The field of GIS started in the 1960s, as computers and early concepts of quantitative and computational geography emerged. Today it enables people to create their own digital map layers to support the analysis of real-world problems.

GIS has also evolved into means for data sharing and collaboration. Today, hundreds of thousands of organizations share their work, creating billions of maps every day, to tell stories and reveal patterns, trends and relationships about practically everything.

GIS has become relevant for almost every human endeavor and will play an increasingly important role in how we understand and address earth problems by using the common language of mapping.

While having been established as an instrument of choice for a large range of applications in the realm of government, engineering, logistics, urban development, and many more, GIS remains a sophisticated visualization tool.

The needs of water resources management

The exploitation of rivers and hydropower reservoirs requires monitoring based on heterogeneous datasets, such as spatial information, terrestrial measurements, meteorological conditions, forecasts, the status of the river banks, flood areas, etc.

Hydropower reservoirs are integral parts of their contingent nature environments, and their operations influence them. That is why it is important to monitor reservoirs within the context of their nature environment. Water resources managers need regularly collected information from different sources, such as detailed data about the condition of the distinct hydropower reservoirs, water economic data, meteorological data and forecasts, geographical information, and information about the integrated nature environment.

Except for exploitation, water resources planning, advanced warning for water related emergency situations like floods, climate change adaptation measures, energy generation potential all of them require flexible interaction with the data, and not mere map visualizations.

Advanced tools

Advanced digital tools in water resources management need to provide a wide range of capabilities, among those:

• the ability to review historic hydrologic and hydrodynamic data,
• the ability to review future hydrologic and hydrodynamic data,
• the ability to provide forecasts about water levels, water quantities – inflows,
• the ability to provide forecasts about turbidity and the changing morphology of the riverbed,
• the ability to review correlations between meteorological factors, like rain, and water levels,
• the ability to visualize hydraulic and water-economic data trends in graphs,
• the ability to synchronize map views with graphs and tabular data,
• the ability to integrate with automatic hydrometric stations,
• and many more

Thus, GIS will not operate as a standalone main tool in water resource management. Rather, it will become part of a complex system that allows for more comprehensive analysis, multipurpose analytics, forecasting, trend analysis, evaluating capacities for public and commercial water resource use, emergency response planning, climate change impact estimates, etc.

ISME-HYDRO® (http://isme-hydro.com), the water resources management solution of Mozaika, is a good example of a service that integrates GIS and provides a wide range of capabilities for stakeholders concerned with water resources, dam and river monitoring and maintenance, flood or drought response, public services, environmental experts and policy makers.