Aquaveo & Water Resources Engineering News

The Ground-water Modeling System (GMS) 10.8 beta includes a model interface that is brand new to the software. HydroGeoSphere (HGS) is a unique three-dimensional control-volume finite element simulator developed by Aquanty that is meant to be able to handle all parts of the terrestrial water cycle. It uses a globally-implicit approach to simultaneously solve the 2D diffusive-wave equation for overland/surface water flow and the 3D form of Richards’ equation for variably saturated groundwater flow. This is different from the many other models that simulate only a portion of the hydrologic cycle. HGS includes components for precipitation, evaporation, overland flow, infiltration, recharge, and more. HGS can simulate both surface and subsurface water flow simultaneously for each time step.

In GMS, the base components for an HGS model include: an unstructured (UGrid), HGS coverages, and an HGS simulation. GMS allows multiple HGS simulations to exist in a single GMS project. A 3D UGrid of the project area is required before building an HGS simulation. There can also be multiple UGrids in one project, although only one UGrid can be assigned to each simulation.

The coverages specific to HGS are boundary conditions, observations, and hydrographs. GMS uses feature objects to define the boundary conditions on an HGS boundary conditions coverage. This includes points, arcs, and polygons. The observations coverage allows you to set observation points that will collect time series information during the simulation run. The hydrograph coverage records hydrograph data during the simulation run.

HGS defines materials with domains and zones. The domain contains information about the type of material. The domain is then assigned a zone number, which is then assigned to a polygon. Multiple domains can be assigned to the same zone.

There’s a lot more to HydroGeoSphere than we can cover in one blog post. If you’d like to learn more about HGS, Aquanty has numerous resources on their website. You can look at the HGS Theory Manual or the HGS Reference Manual. They regularly post webinars on their blog and on their LinkedIn. You can also find videos about how to use HydroGeoSphere as well as presentations that have been made by Aquanty’s staff on their YouTube page. We also have our own HGS tutorials that can walk you through the steps of building an HGS model.

We hope you’re excited about the addition of HydroGeoSphere into GMS 10.8, because we certainly are! Download GMS 10.8 to try out HGS today!

When creating a surface-water model, your model will make use of bathymetry data as either elevation or depth. Knowing how the Surface-water Modeling System (SMS) represents depth versus elevation is vital when it comes to creating, running, and understanding a model. SMS uses several different numerical models, and some models require that depth be negative and elevations be positive, while other models require the opposite.

It can become confusing when trying to remember what is needed for each model, which is why the decision was made to standardize how SMS treats elevation and depth across all models. SMS treats all depth values as negative and all elevation values as positive. That way you don’t have to remember how data needs to be entered for each model. If depth data is entered with positive values, SMS will read the data as part of the land elevations, which will produce incorrect calculations.

Some of the most used models where you may see that the elevation values have been changed to fit SMS’s conventions after importing are CMS-FLOW, CMS Wave, and CGWAVE. If you’re not sure whether or not the imported elevation data has been changed and would like to check, then this is a great time to make use of the Mesh module’s find function. Under both the Nodes menu and the Elements menu you’ll see a Find… option listed. You can use this to quickly locate a specific node or element inside of SMS to compare the elevation data with the model’s files outside of SMS.

If SMS has changed the values of the elevation data to account for the required negative depth value, there is no need to be concerned about how this will affect the end result for your model. SMS automatically adjusts the data to match the convention of the model when the project information is exported to the model executable.

Take this information and head over to SMS, more confident that your project’s elevation data will be handled correctly.

It's been a good year here at Aquaveo and a lot has happened that we're proud of, so we’d like to close out the year by reviewing some of our biggest highlights. We released new versions of our software, including new tools and features. We released SMS (Surface-water Modeling System) 13.3, WMS (Watershed Modeling System) 11.2, and GMS (Groundwater Modeling System) 10.8 beta.

Significant upgrades were made to the color ramp in the contour section of the display options. Many new pre-generated contour color and customization options were added to help you get your project looking just right. But for those of you who prefer to stick with what you know best, the old color ramp options remain available to you through the Legacy options button.

We're excited about what we've got going on in our toolboxes. The toolbox option has made it to WMS with version 11.2, and there are new tools in the toolboxes for GMS and SMS. SMS has tools for backing up meshes and restoring previous meshes., Both GMS and SMS have new tools for generating unstructured grids. This is just a sample of what has changed in the toolboxes. Take a look for yourself to see all the different tool options that have come with the newest versions of our software.

SMS 13.3 has new 3D structure modeling capabilities, which you can learn about on our wiki or use our new 3D Structures tutorials for a more hands-on learning experience. We've also added four new models in SMS 13.3's free community edition: ADCIRC, AdH, CMS-Flow, and STWAVE.

We partnered with Aquanty to bring the HydroGeoSphere model to GMS 10.8 beta. The HydroGeoSphere model can help you more accurately replicate the complex processes involved in the terrestrial part of the hydrological cycle.

WMS 11.2 now includes the WinTR-20 model in the TR-20 interface. WinTR-20 is an updated version of the TR-20 model used in both the WinTR-20 and TR-55 programs. You can learn about what this entails on our wiki, or by using our new tutorial on the WinTR-20 interface.

For Arc Hydro Groundwater (AHGW), we released a version that is compatible with ESRI's ArcGIS Pro. AHGW Pro contains significant updates to the arc hydro groundwater tools and makes use of ArcGIS Pro’s online platform.

We continue to develop our Tethys products, including CityWater. We were pleased to have released the Automated GSSHA Watershed Analysis (AGWA) , an online web application for managing watershed models.

We are also excited about our work with GEOGloWS and our other development partners. We are looking forward to our continued collaboration.

As excited as we are about what happened this past year, we’re even more excited about what 2024 will bring. We can tell you that there will be even more new tools in the Toolbox. We expect to release the full version of GMS 10.8 early in 2024. Also expect more new features for all of your favorite water modeling applications.

You've helped make this year a great one, and we hope you'll come along with us and do the same in 2024!

Do you have solution data that you want to export as raster data? The Surface-water Modeling System (SMS) provides two tools to help you create rasters from datasets. In this blogpost we will discuss the WSE/Depth Raster from Dataset tool and Raster from Dataset tool as well as the uses for both these tools and the differences between them.

WSE/Depth Raster from Dataset tool and Raster from Dataset tool are two separate tools in the SMS Toolbox. Each addresses the process of converting datasets to rasters, but with some differences.

To start, it should be noted that both tools are designed for creating raster data from solution datasets. This means that your project should contain solution data from a successful model run. Also, both tools allow you to define the pixel size of the resulting raster.

The WSE/Depth Raster from Dataset tool creates a raster based on water-surface elevation (WSE) or depth data. The tool requires that you have a geometry containing a WSE or elevation solution dataset in your project and that you have a raster containing the project elevation. It can extract both a WSE raster and a depth raster from a single tool execution. The tool is designed specifically to work with the bathymetry data. Other datasets may be converted incorrectly when using the WSE/Depth Raster from Dataset tool.

For other solution dataset on a geometry, the Raster from Dataset tool can create a raster from those datasets. This tool will work with datasets on various geometries including meshes, scatter sets, and unstructured grids (UGrids). The tool also allows you to use a raster template to define the output origin, activity, and possible resolution.

Now that you know some of the similarities and differences between the WSE/Depths Raster from Dataset tool and the Raster from Datasets tool, try out both of these tools and other features in the SMS Toolbox today!