The City of Houston has been facing flood problems of a serious nature, some of which occurred in 1989, 1992, 1994, 1998, 2001, and 2003. Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001 created the most extensive urban flood damage in U.S. history ($5 billion). Urban flood problems have repeatedly brought attention to the need for improved urban drainage design and flood prediction, as in the case of the T...

In this paper, the second of a series, we apply the models discussed in Part 1 to a significant case study. The nature of the catchment under study, the transport phenomena investigated (i.e. nitrates moving as solutes within runoff waters) and the scales involved in space and time, provide an elaborate test for theory and applications. Com5 parison of modeling predictions with field data (i.e....

Digital elevation models (DEMs) are a useful data source for the automatic delineation of flow paths, sub watersheds and flow networks for hydrologic modeling. Digital representation of the flow network is central to distributed hydrologic models because it encodes the model element linkages through which flow is routed to the outlet. The scale (drainage density) of the flow network, used contr...

A stochastic, spatially explicit method for assessing the impact of land cover classification error on distributed hydrologic modeling is presented. One-hundred land cover realizations were created by systematically altering the North American Landscape Characterization land cover data according to the dataset’s misclassification matrix. The matrix indicates the probability of errors of omissio...

Hydrologic models can be categorized as being either Newtonian or Darwinian in nature. The Newtonian approach requires a thorough understanding of the individual physical processes acting in a watershed in order to build a detailed hydrologic model based on the conservation equations. The Darwinian approach seeks to explain the behavior of a hydrologic system as a whole by identifying simple an...

In this study, a hands-on modeling tool is developed for students in civil engineering and earth science disciplines to help them learn the fundamentals of hydrologic processes and basic concepts of model calibration and sensitivity analysis, and practice conceptual thinking in solving and analysis of engineering problems. This modeling tool aims to provide an interdisciplinary application-orie...