The Power of GIS in the Regulation of Dams

Abstract Only - The Mississippi Dam Safety program, like many other dam safety programs around the country, is tasked with the regulation of a large number of dams with very limited resources available for ongoing inventory management, hazard reclassifications, and the review and approval of hydrologic and hydraulics analysis. To address this need the dam safety program has developed several tools using ESRI’s ArcGIS Model Builder to automate these tasks. Some of the tools developed include an automated simple dam breach model based on the dam’s height and storage volume, tools to calculate available storage above normal pool, a tool to develop the necessary dam heights, storage volumes, etc. to add a dam to inventory, a tool to calculate the composite curve number for a watershed based on the National Land Cover Dataset and hydrologic soil group, and a tool to determine the low point on the top of dam based on lidar data. These tools have substantially decreased the time it takes to accomplish these tasks and have greatly improved the efficiency of the program. This presentation will discuss the basic approach to automating processes in ArcGIS and the details of the tools developed by the Mississippi Dam Safety program.