Water quantity and quality monitoring plays a key role towards the development of a sustainable water sector. Most developing countries lack the required infrastructure needed to monitor and manage their surface and groundwater systems. As such, water quantity and quality data if present are often fragmented, intermittent, not freely shared, lack appropriate metadata, and are stored in formats that hinder establishing seamless coupling with hydrological models. In Lebanon, governmental institutions responsible for water monitoring have invested little in terms of hydroinformatics, resulting in a fragmented and disjoint hydrological information system. Most data, when available, are stored locally with little attention placed on defining and maintaining metadata on the collection protocols, geographic referencing, measurement accuracy, resolution, detection limits, and data censorship. These limitations have made the development and adoption of sound management solutions for the water sector in Lebanon challenging. To alleviate these shortcomings, a National Hydrologic Information System (NHIS) based on the ArcHydro data model was developed. The NHIS has centralized available hydrological and water resources information; coupled spatial coverages with their respective time series data on flow, water demand, meteorology, and water quality; and standardized metadata. Additionally, the developed system ensures support for hydrologic modeling and water resources analysis. A loose coupling between the system and the Water Evaluation And Planning (WEAP) hydrological model was developed and tested on the Upper Litani River Basin. Generated model simulations were in turn exported back and integrated within the NHIS as time series records.
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