Hydrologic Web-Mapping Application of Hofmann Forest with GIS Approach: Case Study

Abstract

In this study, a hydrologic web-mapping application for North Carolina State University’s Hofmann Forest is developed using geospatial information science (GIS) resources, measured point precipitation, and radar precipitation data obtained from the National Weather Service (NWS). The development of such a web application will enhance the visualization and manipulation techniques for hydrologic modeling. This paper’s main focus is on the various steps involved in the development of the web-mapping application and the hydrologic analysis. The two different interpolation methods, one a deterministic method, inverse distance weighting (IDW), and another, a probabilistic method, Kriging, are used to obtain NWS precipitation estimates at 14 forest rain gauge locations. The eventual goal of this project is to use the rain gauge data from the Hofmann Forest to calibrate the spatial pattern of daily radar estimates for use in research and forest operations; however, the accuracy of radar estimates has yet to reach that stage of capability.