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OVERVIEW

Physically-based fully-distributed hydrologic models try to simulate hydrologic state variables in space and time while using information regarding heterogeneity in climate, land use, topography and hydrogeology. However incorporating a large number of physical data layers in the hydrologic model requires intensive data development and topology definitions. Traditionally GIS has been used for data management, data analysis and visualization. But proprietary data structures, platform dependence, isolated data model and non-dynamic data-interaction with pluggable software components of existing GIS frameworks, makes it restrictive to perform sophisticated numerical modeling.

In this effort we present a “tightly-coupled” GIS interface to Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Model (PIHM) called PIHMgis which is open source, platform independent and extensible. The tight coupling between GIS and the model is achieved by developing a shared data-model and hydrologic-model data structure.