Aquaveo & Water Resources Engineering News

When building your Surface-water Modeling System (SMS) project, are you encountering issues because of poorly rendered or imported feature objects? When you have a large number of feature objects, it can be easy to have some drawn in the wrong location, overlapping other objects, or other errors. This can interfere with the operation of the simulation. Cleaning up the feature objects can make the difference in a successful running simulation and one that fails to converge.

When you create your surface water model, either by extracting features from existing data or building them manually, you can end up with multiple arcs and points that are unnecessary for your SMS model or may even interfere with the model’s simulation. By using the Clean Options dialog, you can consolidate or eliminate points, nodes, vertices, and arcs, all based on parameters you select.

The Clean Options dialog gives you multiple options. You can choose to clean every arc in a coverage, but perhaps you only want to focus on one set of arcs, one branch of a stream network for instance. The dialog will allow you to choose. You can run a full clean or select specific actions. You can control how close points, nodes, vertices, and arcs have to be before they are considered for snapping. You can also remove arcs that are less than a length you choose to enter.

The Clean Options dialog can be reached either through the Clean Options macro at the top of SMS, or through the Feature Objects | Clean… menu command. The algorithm used by the dialog applies clean operations to the active coverage in a priority order. Sometimes, snapping will create new cleaning opportunities and bumps the newly created opportunity to the top of the priority list. It will need to go through multiple iterations to check that all have been completed.

For instance, locations are sorted from left-to-right by their X-coordinates, with ties broken by sorting from bottom-to-top by their Y-coordinates. Segments are sorted by comparing their endpoints using the same comparison as for locations. Then the "first" locations on each segment are compared, and the segment containing the earlier location is chosen first. In the event of a tie, the "second" location is used to break the tie, and so on until all points, nodes, and arc segments have been cleaned. Once a location is moved, it is locked in place for the remainder of the iteration.

It is often wise to first duplicate the coverage you are trying to clean and rename it, before running the Clean Options dialog on the duplicate coverage. That way, if the parameters set were too high, you can go back to the original coverage, duplicate, and run it again with different parameters. If the clean didn’t change much, you can alter the selections and run it again.

The Clean Options function can save you a lot of time in fixing issues with your feature objects. Head on over to SMS, and see if the Clean Options function can help your project!

Do you have a Ground-water Modeling System (GMS) project where you are needing to edit values in your constant head cells? If it is a simple grid approach, academic-style project, editing each cell is likely fine. But if you have a large, more complex, conceptual model, editing the constant head cells may prove problematic. Here are some ways that you can accomplish this with a minimum of effort.

A constant head (CHD) cell is an area where the water levels will remain fairly steady no matter what the inflow or outflow may be. Lakes, coastal areas, etc. are good candidates of constant head boundaries. Assigning cells to be constant heads provides a steady boundary where the water levels will stay the same for the model duration.

The constant head cells are typically assigned or edited in one of three ways. One method is to directly edit the IBOUND array. When setting up a MODFLOW simulation or when editing packages, the MODFLOW | Global Options menu will let you choose the IBOUND package to edit the options there including the array. Copying and pasting data from an external spreadsheet into the array could save you time here.

Another method is to select a set of cells and use the 3D Grid Cell Properties dialog. You can right-click on a cell to bring up the dialog. Make sure you are on the MODFLOW tab and edit the “IBOUND” and “Starting head” rows. If multiple cells are selected, this will edit all selected cells.

The simplest method is to define the constant head zones using feature objects as part of a conceptual model in the Map module. When you set up a coverage using the feature objects, the Coverage Setup dialog will allow you to assign CHD to cells in the grid. You can change what the default assignment will be if you also select “Layer Range” and make changes using the Attribute Table.

Whichever method you choose to assign CHD, when you are ready to run your ground-water model, the Model Checker can be used to see if there are errors in the assigned constant head cells. Then you can correct those cells mentioned specifically by using the IBOUND array or the Cell Properties dialog as mentioned above.

Head on over to GMS and see which method of defining your constant head cells works best for you!

For us at Aquaveo, we seek to provide state-of-the-art software for your water resources projects. We’d like to see as many hydrologists, civil engineers, and more using our software to better the community and the world. For this reason, we provide with our Surface-water Modeling System (SMS) software, both a trial, community, and paid editions.

The trial version grants you full access to all the features of SMS for a limited time. Typically, this trial period is for two weeks. During the trial, you can use any of the models or functionalities in SMS. This lets you decide what features of SMS you will need for your project.

After the trial period, or when you are ready, you can contact our sales team for a pad license. WIth a full license, you can select what features you want included. Aquaveo has two primary editions: Riverine, and River and Coast. Add-ons are available for each for the packages, or you can custom build what is unlocked so you have exactly the tools and modules you need for your work.

For some of our users, only a limited number of features are needed. The community edition of SMS includes only some of the core components, such as the GIS and Mesh modules, and a few of the more common surface-water models available, such as SRH-2D, ADCIRC, and CMS-Flow. Some limits have been added to these features, for example the number and size of meshes is limited in community edition. The community edition mostly supports small or simple projects and is not intended to support large or complex models.

There are several advantages to having a paid license over relying on the community edition, including access to newer tools and functionality. Furthermore, a current paid license allows access to Aquaveo's technical support and other resources. Fortunately, it is possible to upgrade to a paid license at any time. Once you have a paid license, you retain access to all the features for the version of license you purchase.

Download SMS today and see what version works best for you!

Does your Surface-water Modeling System (SMS) project require simulating the effects of bridges or culverts? For some time we have had the capacity to simulate these structures in 2D or 1D for use with numeric models such as SRH-2D and TUFLOW. More recently, we have added the ability to create and insert these structures in 3D thus improving your modeling capabilities and visualization options.

When running a model, having a bridge or other structure in the model can change the results of the model run. 3D structures provide more detail for how the structure will fit into the landscape. SMS allows the creation of the structure and inserting it into the 2D model, so you can see how and where it fits into the project. This potentially makes for a more accurate model. Furthermore, an unstructured grid of the 3D structure can be generated to visually show how the structure fits into your model..

Currently, SMS has the ability to create two kinds of 3D structures: bridges and culverts. It can also customize each one to include multiple configurations. 3D structures provide extra flexibility in the simulation, such as being able to have variations in the bridge ceiling along the entire width, which can match the reality of bridge structures much more closely. Your model can also include more than one 3D structure and a mix of types of structures as well. But note, multiple 3D structures could slow down your simulation. Currently, 3D structures can only work with SRH-2D models.

Creating a 3D structure will also automate some things you would have likely needed to do manually beforehand, like create the voids necessary for piers and walls. This reduces the potential for errors that manual void creation can have and improves the reliability of the model.

The 3D structure can be used as part of an observation plot and can also generate a new dataset for the maximum water surface elevation (ceiling elevation) in the model. Overtopping is, of course, included, as well as pressure flow through the culvert or under the bridge.

Head on over to SMS and see how adding 3D structures can improve your project today.