The Development of a Coordinated Database for Water Resources and Flow Model in the Paso Del Norte Watershed
Abstract
This report fulfills the deliverables required by the cooperative agreement between the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers and Texas Agricultural Experiment Station (TAES/03-PL-02:
Modification No. 2) on behalf of the Paso del Norte Watershed Council. Tasks accomplished in
this phase include (a) review of hydrological models in the region; (b) conceptual model of the
Rio Grande flow; and (c) linkage protocol of the coordinated database and hydrological models.
In addition, a training workshop on the RiverWare model was offered to regional water
stakeholders. Twenty-four trainees attended the workshop at New Mexico State University on
December 15-17, 2004. The Project Team also provided review on the FLO-2D model
simulation of the Rio Grande flood control scenarios at the U.S. IBWC on August 3, 2005,
review of QA/QC procedures of the real-time data collection, and assessment of regional
orthophotographic images in 2005.
This Project was conducted by researchers at Texas A&M University (TAMU) and New Mexico
State University (NMSU) under the direction of Zhuping Sheng of TAMU. It was developed to
enhance the coordinated database, which was originally developed by the Paso del Norte
Watershed Council with support of El Paso Water Utilities to fulfill needs for better
management of regional water resources and to expand the Upper Rio Grande Water
Operations Model (URGWOM) to cover the river reaches between Elephant Butte Dam, New
Mexico and Fort Quitman, Texas. In Phase I of this Project (TAES/03-PL-02), hydrological
data needed for flow model development were compiled and data gaps were identified. The
objectives of this phase were to develop a conceptual model of the Rio Grande flow between
Elephant Butte Dam and American Dam by using data collected in the first development phase
of the PdNWC/Corps Coordinated Water Resources Database and to enhance the data portal
capabilities of the PdNWC Coordinated Database Project.
The first part of this report (corresponding to Task Five of the contract for the Development of
a Coordinated Database and GIS for Water Related Resources in the Rio Grande Watershed,
written by Sue Tillery, Phillip King and Zhuping Sheng), summarizes the hydrological models
developed for surface water and groundwater flows and management of regional water resources
in terms of model configuration, advantages, and limitations of each modeling approach. This
part of the report also identifies and verifies the availability of relevant hydrological data needed
for development of the RiverWare model, especially hydrology of drain return flows. Based on
previous modeling studies, the authors evaluated reasonable simplifications (through the use of
look-up tables or similar tools) of interaction of surface and groundwater within the Mesilla
Basin and Rincon Valley and developed the RiverWare conceptual model for the Rio Grande
flow for the selected reaches and within the limits of available data.
The second part of this report was written by C. Brown and B. Creel and summarizes the data
portal enhancements to the PdNWC Coordinated Database for its linkage to the URGWOM
development. This part of the report describes enhancements to the data portal capabilities of
the Project through the development of a low-end user interface that would serve GIS-based
graphics of each data set and enhanced metadata of relevant data sets. A literature search of
bibliographic resources detailing GIS-based hydrologic modeling in the Paso del Norte region
and linkages to these resources are provided via portions of the Project website.
Collections
Citation
Sheng, Zhuping; Tillery, Sue; King, Phillip J.; Creel, Bobby; Brown, Christopher; Michelsen, Ari; Srinivasan, Raghavan; Granados, Alfredo (2006). The Development of a Coordinated Database for Water Resources and Flow Model in the Paso Del Norte Watershed. Texas Water Resources Institute. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /6086.