Hydraulic Model Interface

For this lab we will use a freely available model interface called IRIC, formerly known as MDSWMS. MDSWMS stands for the Multi-Dimensional Surface Water Modeling System and was developed by John Nelson's Geomorphology and Sediment Transport Lab at the USGS.

The download pages for IRIC are here. There is a partially outdated, but still useful online help here (for MDSWMS). As the download is a little weird (sometimes you have to rename file extensions after downloading), I've put the installer, the help installer and the help exercises in a zip file here as an alternative. The software needs to be installed as well as the help file (separately).

The model we'll use within IRIC is FASTMECH. IRIC currently supports both FASTMECH and MDSWMS and both are briefly described by Simoes and MacDonald (2004) here.

Popular Alternative Interfaces

• River2D (free)
• SRH-2D (free) - Developed by USBR - Allows unstructured computational meshes!
  
• SMS (Surface Water Modeling System) - By AUQA-VEO, and not free. Supports river hydrodynamic modeling with FESWMS, RMA2, RMA4, and TUFLOW.
• DELFT 3D Suite (not free, but available to researchers)
• Hydro 2DE - Raster based CFD (not free)

Pre-Processing Topographic Data - GIS

We will use the 3D Analyst Extension in ArcGIS 10 to build and refine our topographic model. If you need a student version of ArcGIS, see me. If you need a refresher on building TINs and DEMs in ArcGIS 10, see this tutorial from my GIS class.