Developing a GIS to Facilitate Data Analysis for Environmental Restoration of a Large Waste Site

The Hanford Site is a 1500-km² area located in southeastern Washington State and is a U.S. Department of Energy Superfund cleanup site. The site contains a complex mixture of chemical and radioactive pollutants, which makes environmental monitoring, analysis, and restoration a complicated task. The Hanford Environmental Information System (HEIS) has been developed to manage the data generated from the characterization and environmental monitoring of the Hanford Site. The Geographic Information System (GIS) component of HEIS, known as HEISGIS, is being developed to help scientists spatially analyze the environmental data stored in the HEIS database and provide an integrated system for environmental restoration. HEISGIS is in its second stage of development. The first stage produced a working prototype. The second stage focuses on improvements in data accuracy, data standardization, analytical modeling capabilities, interfaces between the various software packages, and the graphical user interface. This paper describes the development of the HEISGIS and summarizes the considerations and difficulties encountered in the integration of the GIS with a large relational database.