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Increased Functionality of Floodplain Mapping Automation: Utah Inundation Mapping System (UTIMS)

Flood plain mapping has become an increasingly important part of flood plain management. Flood plain mapping employs mapping software and hydraulic calculation packages to efficiently map flood plains. Modelers often utilize automation software to develop the complex geometries required to reduce the time to develop hydraulic models. The Utah Inundation Mapping System (UTIMS) is designed to reduce the time required to develop complex geometries for use in flood plain mapping studies. The automated geometries developed by UTIMS include: flood specific river centerlines, bank lines, flow path lines, cross sections and areal averaged n-value polygons. UTIMS thus facilitates developing automated input to US Army Corps of Engineer's HEC-RAS software. Results from HEC-RAS can be imported back to UTIMS for display and mapping. The user can also specify convergence criteria for water surface profile at selected locations along the river and thus run UTIMS and HEC-RAS iteratively till the convergence criterion is met. UTIMS develops a new flood specific geometry file for each iteration, enabling an accurate modeling of flood-plain. Utilizing this robust and easy to operate software within the GIS environment modelers can significantly reduce the time required to develop accurate flood plain maps. The time thus saved in developing the geometries allows modelers to spend more time doing the actual modeling and analyzing results. The time thus saved can also result in faster turn around and potential cost cutting in flood-plain modeling work. In this paper the authors describe UTIMS capabilities, compare them with other available software, and demonstrate the UTIMS flood plain automation process using a case study.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UTAHS/oai:digitalcommons.usu.edu:etd-1584
Date01 May 2010
CreatorsStevens, Brian K.
PublisherDigitalCommons@USU
Source SetsUtah State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceAll Graduate Theses and Dissertations
RightsCopyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact Andrew Wesolek (andrew.wesolek@usu.edu).

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