Meeting/Event Information

About the Speaker: 

Pete has been a water resources professional for more than 45 years specializing in distributive physically based integrated modeling of large-scale surface and groundwater systems. Although recently retired, he was the founder and original owner of Streamline Technologies and was responsible for the creation and evolution of the widely used ICPR software (now called StormWise). Pete also led the development team of the real-time flood forecasting system called FloodWise which is used across Florida and predicts compound riverine and coastal flooding several days in advance.

Topic:

Use of raster data has become commonplace among civil and water resources engineers. For example, lidar-based terrain data in the form of a digital elevation model (DEM) is a raster dataset comprised of uniform-sized grids (e.g., 1 meter) each geospatially located in a Cartesian or latitude-longitude coordinate system. Individual grids are assigned colors based on their elevation in accordance with a user-defined color ramp. Other examples of raster datasets include NEXRAD rainfall data, the USGS National Land Cover Database, and NRCS raster soils surveys. And of course, GIS tools can be used to convert vector maps into raster maps for subsequent analyses and manipulation. What these examples have in common is that they are geospatial datasets meaning each raster cell is located on the surface of the earth with an x-y coordinate. Other than perhaps a snapshot in time, these datasets do not include a temporal component.

In this presentation, we will explore how time can be incorporated into a raster chart. Instead of locating each grid by its geospatial coordinates, they are placed temporally by short-term (e.g., time of day) and long-term (e.g., day of year) time coordinates as illustrated in the figure below. Trends and anomalies are easily discerned in raster charts such as these. Numerous examples will be presented including: (1) relationships between tides, wind speed, wind direction, barometric pressure, and temperature data for the 2024 hurricane season along the west coast of Florida; (2) more than a century of hourly tide data for Key West illustrating both seasonal (e.g., when king tides are likely to occur) and long-term trends (e.g., sea level rise); (3) flows and stages along the Manatee River; and, (4) operational considerations for structures in the Upper St. Johns River Basin. It will be demonstrated how the raster chart can be another powerful tool for engineers and hydrologists.