Term Paper Suggestions

CEE 6440 Term Paper Suggestions

Following is a list of potential topics you could use for term papers. In addition to these ideas you are encouraged to review the web sites giving term papers from previous years.

Something related to your own research. If there is any GIS aspect to your research you are encouraged to do this so that the work done is useful to you.
An analysis of the distribution of Snow from SNOTEL sites, or from NOHRSC products.
A comparison of basinwide precipitation versus streamflow to establish regional runoff ratio's. Precipitation data sources could be NEXRAD, NCDC, PRISM, SNOTEL, Western Regional Climate Center. Streamflow data dources could be USGS Benchmark Stations from the Hydro-Climatic Data Network or National Water Information System. Other GIS data sources discussed in the class on data sources could also be brought in to this analysis.
An examination of spatial patterns or trends in hydrologic data, related perhaps to climate and land cover changes.
- e.g. How has mean annual streamflow, or the timing of peak flows changed over time and is this correlated with watershed changes or measured climate changes (precipitation and temperature)
A tool or model for doing something useful in GIS. ArcGIS is designed to be extendable and customizable and there is a lot of online information on customizing ArcGIS (using python and visual basic). Some possibilities include

Display of flow directions visually (using arrows, e.g. as a shapefile written from Python)
An extension to TauDEM. (See me if you have programming ability and are interested in this)

e.g. a new tool to extract and prepare the input to HEC HMS
User interface functionality for ArcGIS 10
Carving or optimal pit removal

An extension or plug-in to HydroDesktop
- e.g. a plugin to call TauDEM functions
- functionality to use GDAL library to display a broad class of grids
- functionality to interface with MATLAB

Map functionality for sharing and publishing data using ArgGIS server / HydroServer. An implementation for a specific project, or an extension of generic functionality.
An evaluation of different methods for channel and watershed delineation. Much of my research described at http://www.neng.usu.edu/dtarb involves methods for channel network delineation based on digital elevation models. The software (TAUDEM) facilitates this. It would be interesting to formally compare some of the methods I have developed against data for example in the National Hydrography dataset.

Team projects

I will consider "team projects" (up to 3 people per team), as long as the role of each in the project is clearly written out and that when the project is presented, each presents their contribution to the overall project. I will also consider "associated projects" that are separate but related and have been developed cooperatively. For example one person may develop a dataset as the product of some analysis, and the other person may develop an Internet Map Server to interactively disseminate it on the web. As another example two people may each develop custom ArcGIS tools that can be used together to achieve some result. If contemplating a team project, you should choose team member partners carefully, as you will need to rely on them produce something your project depends on. For team projects each team member should have material on their website that describes the overall project and their specific contribution, i.e. the material on team member websites may have overlap, but should be different in the specific contribution.