| A hydrology simulation model may be composed of three elements: function programs, data sets and maps. When a model is constructed with its three elements separated, its portability and user-friendliness are usually limited because any modification of one component will not be reflected in the others. The purpose of this research is to develop a map-based flow simulation model with all three model-components integrated. The model is constructed under a geographic information system (GIS) and based on the concepts of object-oriented programming. As its name suggests, a map-based model is map-centric and it allows all the regular model procedures such as construction, simulations, modifications, and result processing to be activated directly from the model maps. Based on this 'map-centric', and object-oriented concept, a map-based surface/subsurface flow simulation model is developed and successfully applied to simulate surface and subsurface flow on the Niger river basin in West Africa. In the process of constructing this map-based model, techniques are also developed to address and solve some GIS related problems such as treatment of spatially-referenced time series data, feature oriented map operations, dynamic segmentation of an arc, and integration of flows along a line. |
