Application of desktop GIS for decision support in groundwater management

摘要

In this paper, a split approach to decision support systems for groundwater management is proposed. In the initial phase, a model specialist performs data acquisition, model design and calibration, using an appropriate software package. As a result, a set of carefully selected basic management scenarios is generated. Simple superposition of these will allow to approximately solve a large number of variations of a class of management alternatives. For the phase of scenario analysis and decision support, the relevant data and the results of the base scenarios are transferred to a desktop GIS (ArcView). A convenient ArcView user interface was developed to formulate a scenario, do the required overlays of the base scenarios and visualise and characterise the impacts. For a case study problem of optimal well locations under a variety of constraints, this paper presents the development of base scenarios and the decision support tools developed for ArcView. The accuracy of the overlay results is determined by comparison with the results obtained by a full numerical simulation.