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Converting a NEXRAD Rainfall Map into a Flood Inundation Map by ...

Converting a NEXRAD Rainfall Map into a Flood Inundation Map by ...

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Chapter 2 Literature Review2.1 COUPLING METHODSGiven the spatial nature of floodplain management components, a GISbasedflood information system is desirable. Coupling methods for integratingGIS and engineering models have been explored since late 1980s as part of theGIS community’s efforts to improve the analytical capabilities of GIS (Sui andMaggio, 1999). In spite this effort, it has been stated that GIS is limited in itsability to perform any kind of engineering modeling (Yang and Tsai, 2000) andcan only provide for data storage, management, inventory, and mappingfunctionalities. In flood studies, GIS has normally been used to display theresulting flood boundaries under different formats like vector, raster, and TIN(Azagra et al., 1999). The static “nature” of GIS has been recognized as a largeconstraint through strong statements in the literature.“Until GIS has explicit time variation in its data structures, its role willlargely be limited to an input data provider, output display, and mapping device”(Maidment, 1993).Thus, for many years it has been believed that GIS can only contribute toenvironmental modeling <strong>by</strong> adding the benefits of its capabilities for handling andstoring massive spatially distributed data which is then given a format (via ExportUtilities) for the input of a given model or imported after a model simulation isexecuted for visualization and spatial analysis. In other words, a pure pre- andpost-processor functionality has been attributed to GIS.8

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