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Governor’s Council on Geographic Information

Hydrography Committee Meeting Minutes

May 6, 2004
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency
Conference Room 1-2
520 Lafayette Road
St. Paul, Minnesota, 55155

Agenda:

Mn/DOT Modeling Activities

(Thomas Martin, Mn/DOT Hydraulics)

The Minnesota Department of Transportation Hydraulics Division is creating a model of the Hydraulics Infrastructure. There are approximately 90,000 hydraulic features near roads, and the inventory is about 50% done. The Hydraulic Facility component includes culverts, catch basins, manholes, end treatment ponds, etc. These features are tied to an inspection process. The model needs to be consistent with models for the NPDES (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) model MS4, and needs to tie in with models for Waters of the State. Basically you need to know where any road, bridge, or associated hydraulic structure impacts a surface water feature. Modeling of freight facilities, particularly shipping, also needs to be tied into to Waters of the State.

According to DNR (from state statute) “Waters of the State” include anything but overland flow: i.e., any surface water as soon as it collects into a channel or a basin, and any ground water. Some work was done at DNR a few years ago to attempt to create a logical model for “Waters of the State”.

Mn/DOT needs to be able to identify all common means of locating a feature, including linear referencing to river reaches. For this reason they will be very interested in tying the data in with the high-resolution NHD via the Reach Indexing Tools of NHD.

Review of the Watershed/Hydrologic Unit Standard

(Susanne Maeder, LMIC)

Maeder presented and the committee discussed a draft of the Watershed/Hydrologic Unit Standard. This standard attempts to reconcile state practices and federal standards as defined for the nationwide Watershed Boundary Dataset. At this point the document still contains information on the history of both processes, and needs to be pared down into more of a standards format. Discussion comments will be worked into a new revision of this document to be further discussed at the next meeting.

Interested parties can obtain a copy of the standard from Susanne Maeder (Susanne.maeder@state.mn.us)

Agency Updates

Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

DNR Watershed/lakeshed mapping project has completed 16 major watersheds and sent them to NRCS for review as potential Watershed Boundary Dataset material (attempting to fold the Minnesota product into the national watershed mapping effort). DNR staff has not had feedback from NRCS yet. Not all attributes required by NRCS have been added. DNR could use help from NRCS on this. An additional 9 major watershed delineations are close to completion. New staff people Andrea Bergman and Jim Krumrie were hired (from USGS) to work on this project. Bart Richardson is also assigned to the project part-time and is working on metadata. DNR will do a presentation on this project at the next Hydro Committee meeting. (DNR Waters)

DNR Fisheries is adding and improving the trout streams layer DNR Waters is working on a Streams Public Waters Inventory layer, which is currently in internal review.

DNR Waters reports that Public Waters Inventory Basins (lakes and wetlands) are in field review for all but 10 counties. They are starting to do corrections based on review information.

DNR Management Information Systems Bureau expects that the “DNR Data Deli 2” will be available soon.

Minnesota Pollution Control Agency

MPCA staff is working on Water Quality Assessments and Impaired Waters reporting for 2004.

Additional work is being done on the Environmental Data Access (EDA) ArcIMS web mapping application.

High-resolution National Hydrography Dataset development is 80% complete.

MPCA, with LMIC, submitted a proposal to the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Environmental Information Exchange Network (NEIEN), to extend the exchange network to support NHD event data. The project will involve storing a complete set of NHDinGeo format high-resolution NHD data for Minnesota; developing the hydrologic event schema, creating more referenced data from many agencies’ data sets, and porting data to the federal exchange network. The proposal was approved, and a formal workplan needs to be submitted to EPA in June.

Minnesota Department of Transportation

HydInfra (Hydraulic Infrastructure) model development – 4th generation

Bridge Engineering – assembling information on watershed areas upstream of bridges – and potential flow levels (at 50-year, 100-year flood, etc), for bridge crossings. Surface areas are being calculated for most DNR minor watersheds.

Land Management Information Center

LMIC jointly worked on the EPA-NEIEN proposal with MPCA

Working on completing the Watershed/Hydrologic Unit Standard

Working with Minnesota River Basin Data Center to submit a proposal to fund more documentation and distribution of water-related data

Involved in national efforts: tying local web mapping activities into The National Map and metadata activities into the GeoSpatial OneStop

Metropolitan Council/MetroGIS

Metropolitan Council Environmental Services Division’s EIMS (Environmental Information Management System) is an interactive web query and mapping tool for Met Council’s water data holdings. It is currently an intranet application but will become public once firewall issues are resolved.

MCES stream analysis work identified streams linework needing updates. They are working on an update procedure and would like to roll the updates to the state level – both to the DNR 1:24,000 streams layer and to high-resolution NHD.

MCES lakes and wetland work – They have created a lakes layer that matches the 2000 DOQ’s and would like to do the same with streams.

MCES is working with the Metropolitan Mosquito Control District and DNR to create an improved wetlands layer combining MMCD digital work, Metropolitan Council aerial photography, and DNR wetlands information.

MetroGIS staff support work: staff will be setting up a metro-level work group to review standards for hydrography, to determine whether the statewide data is good enough for use at the regional level.

Governor’s Council Issues – Other Committees

Developing a new draft document and template for the MSDI or “Minnesota Spatial Data Infrastructure”. The templates are for the individual framework data layers, such as hydrography, transportation, and parcels/cadastral.

Standards Review – review period for Reach/Watercourse standard should be complete.

Natural Resources Conservation Service

Banette Kritzky is the new NRCS representative to the Hydro Committee, and will be the contact for watershed development and the NRCS Minnesota liaison for the Watershed Boundary Dataset

NRCS will be migrating to ArcGIS 9 in the fall.

Kritzky will be providing GIS support to the 7 new regional GIS staff people hired by NRCS. These staff will provide liaison and support to the counties.

United States Geological Survey – Water Resources Division

Continuing to work with DNR on the Lakeshed Delineation Project for selected watersheds

Developing Basin Characteristics for major and minor watersheds

Developing paper on stream slopes and estimation of flood frequencies

Testing ArcHydro Data Model and online watershed characteristics generation

Attendees:

Carrie Bartz, MPCA
Andrea Bergman, DNR Waters
Joe Gibson, DNR Waters
Paul Hanson, Metropolitan Council
Steve Kloiber, Metropolitan Council
Banette Kritzky, NRCS
Jim Krumrie, DNR Waters
Susanne Maeder, LMIC
Robert Maki, DNR MIS
Thomas Martin, Mn/DOT
Mark Olsen, MPCA
Glenn Radde, DNR Waters
Chris Sanocki, USGS-WRD
Jim Solstad, DNR Waters
Sean Vaughn, DNR Waters
Danielle Wagner, NRCS

 

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