Quoted from: Artan, Guleid A., Kwabena Asante, Jodie Smith, Shahriar Pervez, Debbie Entenmann, James P. Verdin, and James Rowland. "Users’ manual for the geospatial stream flow model (GeoSFM)." World Wide Web 605 (2008): 594-6151. https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2007/1440/pdf/ofr2007-1440.pdf

The Geospatial Stream Flow Model (GeoSFM) was developed to establish a common visual environment for the monitoring of hydrologic conditions over wide areas (Artan and others, 2001). The monitoring activities include topographic analysis, data assimilation, time series processing, and presentation of the results. The GeoSFM is designed to use remotely sensed meteorological data in data sparse parts of the world (Artan and others, 2007). Many of the data sets involved in these processes are raster grids. The spatially distributed nature of the raster grids used in these processes required the adoption of a customizable geographic information system with excellent raster functionality. The ArcView GIS software was adopted for the implementation because it provided a visual, customizable development environment with excellent support of raster operations. An ArcView extension was developed (in Avenue) for the geospatial processing operations and for initializing time series analysis tasks. Routines for performing the hydrologic computations involved in mass balance and routing were developed in a mixed programming environment (C/C++ and Visual Fortran) and compiled as dynamically linked libraries (DLLs). These DLLs are called up directly from within ArcView scripts, eliminating the need to develop a separate interface for hydrologic routing operations. Descriptions of the algorithms used within these programs are presented in the GeoSFM Technical Manual (Asante and others, 2007a). This Users Manual describes the software components, data sets, processing steps, and input/output files associated with running the model. It also includes appendices which provide step-by-step instructions, with associated screen images, to guide users through model set up procedures.