Acknowledgment

The following is a copy of the formal acknowledgment that was part of the above titled thesis.

In presenting this thesis, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the help I received from some very special people. First, I would like to thank Dr. Frank Weirich, my adviser, for extending his complete support and encouragement during the preparation of the thesis. I wish to express my sincere appreciation for his help. Special thanks are due to Dr. Marc Armstrong and Dr. George Malanson, for their inputs to the methodological issues of the study and comments on previous drafts of the thesis. I am grateful to both of them. Mr. David Larson, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, put forward personal efforts for providing input data necessary for estimation of parameter values for the watershed modeled in this study. I sincerely thank him for showing keen interest in the success of this study.

I would also like to express my grateful thanks to the authors of the original version of ANSWERS and of GRASS-ANSWERS interface, especially Dr. David Beasley at North Carolina State University, and Dr. Bernard Engel and Dr. Larry Huggins at Purdue University, for responding to my queries on the model used for this study. I also wish to extend my thanks to the people participating in the 'grassu-list' newsgroup in the internet, whose discussion served as navigational assistance to my dealing with GRASS data sets. In particular, I am thankful to Dr. Scott Miller, USDA, for posting in the newsgroup a fairly detailed description of the method for conversion of data from ARC/INFO to GRASS.

Members of the "Weirich Group" deserve thanks for their overall support during the progress of this study. In particular, I am indebted to Dr. Jian Dai, for sharing 'part' of his "ARC expertise" with me, Joyce Johnson, for allowing me to use some of the data digitized by her for an earlier study, and Brian Aker, for the technical (Computing System) supports I received from him. I would also like to thank Leonhard Blesius, Mary Lata, Ed Nealson, and everyone else in the Weirich Group for friendly support and enthusiastic encouragement, that few others have had the fortune to enjoy.

Lastly, I wish to thank my parents and other members in my family for their infinite encouragement to me, and unwavering faith in my ability to succeed.

- M. Sayeeduzzaman

(c) Copyright 1996-2006 M. Sayeeduzzaman
All Rights Reserved.