Background:

The Environmental Protection Agency has launched a program nationwide to clean America’s rivers. This strategy is known as Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL). It consists of analyzing a river network for water quality and determining the source and method of cleaning for any pollution in substandard water quality segments. The Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC) is systematically using this TMDL process over the basins of the state.

Objectives:

My project will involve preliminary steps in the development of a geospatial database for Basin Group C. This basin group includes the San Jacinto River Basin, the Coastal Basins consisting of the San Jacinto-Brazos, the Trinity-San Jacinto, and the Neches-Trinity, and the 21 Bay and Estuary water quality segments adjacent to the basins. My initial approach and term paper topic will be to develop a river network for these basins. I plan to compile hydrological, administrative, point data, and other information about the area into data layers in a GIS format. The information of main concern will be the RF3 files, which will need to be analyzed before creating the network, using ArcView and ArcInfo tools.

Related Work:

This project will be in conjunction with my Master’s thesis research. Also working on this basin group and TMDL development is fellow first year grad student Jordan Furnans. Similar projects and tools have already been researched and developed by Kim Davis and Jona Finndis Jonsdottir.