Comments, Conclusions, and Future Work

Comments

This project contained many natural complications and tedious procedures.  The terrain, by being very flat, provided a challenge in the approach to dealing with the drainage.  The canal system mentioned earlier presented a problem when trying to incorporate the natural and artificial flow paths of the surface water.  Many different options were discussed on how to deal with this problem, and the prevailing opinion was any option would not be a perfect solution. 

Additionally, the coastal aspect of the basin also confused me on how to deal with the bays and bayous at the south part of the basin.   I was originally unsure of how to represent them as single line features, and if they needed to be represented at all. 

Creating the river network and canal network held the most frustration in the tediousness and repetitiveness of the processes involved.   With the completion of the National Hydrography Dataset, hopefully most of this procedure will become much easier. 

Conclusions

After working through these daunting problems, the procedures I used are determined to be successful.  By delineating the watersheds for the TMDL segments themselves in ArcInfo, the results appear accurate.   They are proven to be consistent as seen with the watershed delineation for the individual reach arcs.  Therefore, I can conclude that the procedure presents itself as one solution to the coastal complications, for the time being.  I can also conclude that the watersheds by which the other geospatial information will be analyzed have been delineated and can be used for water quality modeling purposes. 

Future Work

Because this work is only a small portion of my work for the Master's thesis, I have my work cut out for me.  My next steps for this project will be:

• Do a more indepth analysis of the incremental drainage areas for the two watershed themes.  I need to dissolve the polygons to ensure that there is only one polygon for one segment.  Because ArcInfo does not dissolve cell polygons only connected at the corners, I will need to utilize the CRWR menus to perform these functions.
• Delineate watersheds using the "double burning" method to check accuracy of watershed delineation.  While I do want to perform this delineation simply because I spent a large amount of my semester building these river and canal networks, and then not utilizing them, it is also a way to validate the delineation are made, and compare and analyze any differences.
• Utilize the National Hydrography Dataset.   Now that the NHD is publicly available, it should eliminate some of the hassle that accompanied building the river network.
• Compile the Geospatial Database Layers based on the delineated watersheds.  I need to gather the requested data layers and project them to TSMS Albers Equal Area Projection.
• Repeat this entire procedure for the other basins in Basin Group C.  However, as technology is changing, and the ArcInfo 8/GeoObject Model is growing, the procedure will evolve and change over the next year and a half, that I can almost guarantee that it will not be the same for any basin. 

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