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Integrating Hydrologic and Environmental Data Into Iowa's GIS Infrastructure

The GIS community in Iowa is beginning a process to integrate various hydrologic and environmental data sets into its local and state GIS infrastructure. Much of this data is from dynamic sources, such as remote sensing satellites, weather radars, river gauging stations, but also includes output from digital models of physical processes of watersheds, land surface models, river routing, sediment delivery and others. Traditionally most GIS data is fairly static: locations, types and extents of towns and roads, streams, wetlands and lakes, land use, soils and terrain. Dynamic environmental data tries to describe the state or conditions of the water cycle, and has traditionally been within the realm of weather forecasters and climate modelers at the federal research level and universities. Many challenges exist to bringing this environmental data into the GIS world, including but not limited to finding and converting appropriate remote sensing data for local GIS uses, inability of GIS to handle 3D and temporal data sets, collecting and storing large, real-time data sets from short term Internet sites, finding appropriate physical models to use available environmental data sets and software that easily links to GIS data storage. One approach to enabling local and state GIS users to benefit from the vast environmental data holdings is to build up the state’s GIS infrastructure and capacity, using local knowledge and expertise to capture data streams, convert and reprocess them into usable GIS forms and subsets, and redistribute both raw data and model output using OGC compliant services available to anyone. The Iowa Geographic Information Council is sponsoring workshops to develop the community resources necessary to begin this process of merging environmental data into the mainstream GIS infrastructure