Data Models for River-Basin Management in Mexico

Abstract

One of the main problems about water-related data in Mexican hydrological regions is related to the different kinds of structure that are used to handle it. In addition, in many cases, the geographic and temporal information is disjointed, inaccurate, or incomplete, and it is difficult to establish a topological relationship among the elements that represent the basin in an integral way. For this reason, the development of relational data models (geodatabases) for each of the hydrological regions of Mexico is fundamental. This kind of structure would enable integrating georeferenced and temporal information, establishing several connections among geographic and historical data. One of the main advantages of these relational datasets resides in the specific structure to manage millions of records, establishing a relationship with gauging stations, such as hydrometric or meteorological stations, from which the simulation models could read and input all the needed data to generate various alternatives for making recommendations for water allocation in the Mexican hydrological basins. Another technique proposed is watershed regionalization, that is, dividing large hydrological regions to achieve the goal of watershed parameterization.