The course is designed for professionals (engineers and scientists) active in the water sector, especially those involved in using simulation models for water management.
For many studies models are used or developed. During modelling courses not much attention is paid to the preprocessing of input data and parameters needed for the models. A lot of open source software is available for this purpose. Besides desktop tools with graphical user interfaces, scripting is very useful for processing large datasets and timeseries. With the skills learned in the first week of this course you will be able to find open access GIS data and more efficiently process your data for your models using tools like QGIS, GDAL and Python. In the second week you will acquire practical experience during computer exercises on hydraulic modelling with HEC-RAS. HEC-RAS is a software program that models hydrodynamics of flow in a river and/or channel. It is used to determine if for a given discharge the flow exceeds the river bank levels. Flooding studies can be carried out to determine the flood extent and volume.
Upon completion, the participant should be able to:
1. Convert tables to GIS data
2. Join attribute tables
3. Calculate new attributes
4. Convert between different GIS formats and projections
5. Georeference a scanned map
6. Digitize vector layers from scanned maps
7. Delineate catchments and streams
