Integrating multicriteria analysis and GIS for assessing raingage worth within an established network

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology is used to develop automated methods for assessing raingage networks. An ArcView GIS module has been developed by incorporating simple statistical methods with the software's spatial analysis capabilities, visualization, and AVENUE scripts (the ArcView programming language). The main purpose of the module is to provide a decision support for reducing the number of gages in an existing network without compromising the reliability and quality of the information obtained. Two test cases were used, one from the country of Switzerland for demonstration and the other, the island of Crete in Greece for validation of the module. Results show that integrating GIS with statistical models provides a unique opportunity for decision makers to pass reliable judgement for the reconfiguration of a spatial network.