SIMPA, a GRASS based Tool for Hydrological Studies

SIMPA is a Spanish acronym meaning "Integrated System for Rainfall-Runoff Modelling". This system comprises hydrological tools to analyse spatial and temporal hydrological variables and to simulate several hydrological processes. It was implemented in the Centre for Hydrographic Studies of CEDEX (Ministry of Environment of Spain) (http://www.cedex.es). It was implemented using GRASS as the GIS spatial database of the system (U.S. Army CERL, 1993; GRASS Development Team, 2002). Models cope with water resources, flood events and quality assessment. SIMPA models for water resources assessment were used in the White Paper Book of Waters in Spain, for the National Water Master Plan in 2000 and in Honduras in 2003. Some other studies have also been done for flood event estimation in culvert and bridge hydraulic designs, as in flash floods occurred in Biescas (1996) and Badajoz (1997). Recent developments are focused on implementing quality hydrological models.