Aquaveo & Water Resources Engineering News

These days, everything seems to be in “the cloud”, and for good reason. No more having to email or manually deliver a flash drive or DVD containing the documents or data. Having it stored in one online location accessible to everyone on the project makes everything more convenient, and makes it far easier to collaborate with others in your organization.

As an example a cloud-based application, you can use CityWater on the Aquaveo Portal, to access municipal water distribution data from anywhere using a modern web browser. One person uploads an input file for the model which can then be accessed by anyone in the organization.

Once the model has be uploaded, you and your colleagues can create multiple scenarios to generate alternate models. This allows quick collaboration for group planning of municipal water distribution projects. Feedback and comments can be made from multiple contributors to help everyone have their say. CityWater does all this while maintaining the integrity and security of the original model.

Your whole process becomes much simpler because the CityWater controls are designed from the ground up to scale from desktop to tablet to smart phone, all without removing any of the functionality. So, whether you’re in your office or out on a work site, the relevant data can be easily accessed with just a few taps. New and updated information can also be entered on the fly to make the model results more specific and accurate.

Because it doesn’t have to be purchased and installed on every computer or device, CityWater is much more cost effective. This allows the cost per user to be significantly lower, and your IT department won’t be burdened with additional work. The software behind CityWater is regularly updated, so anytime you log in through the Aquaveo Portal, you are using the most current version.

Try out the CityWater tool today by going to the Aquaveo Portal. Use “trycitywater” as the username and password.

Using a watershed delineation tool is one of the first steps in creating a usable model for any sort of watershed, whether for conservation of natural resources, further development of a municipal drainage system, or determining potential flood zones. Tools such as TauDEM can make the process much simpler by basing those calculations off an existing DEM.

The process is generally straightforward:

1. Import a DEM for the area in question.

   DEMs can be obtained many different ways. They can be imported directly using the features in WMS, they can be downloaded for free from the USGS and other governmental sites, or they can be created by you using lidar or similar tools. This is the DEM used in this example:

   
2. Once the DEM is imported, activate the Drainage module.
3. Select DEM | Compute Flow Direction/Accumulation... to bring up the Flow Direction/Accumulation Run Options dialog.
4. Select Run TauDEM under Select the model to determine the flow direction/accumulation.
5. If you want to use multiple processors, check the box next to Use MPICH2 and enter the number of processors.

   If you don’t know if your computer has multiple processors, simply leave the box unchecked.

6. If this is your first time running MPICH2, click Register MPIEXEC and enter your username and password at the prompt. This should be your Windows username and password.
7. Click OK to close the Flow Direction/Accumulation Run Options dialog and bring up the Units dialog.
8. Set the units to be appropriate for the location of the project and click OK.

   The watershed delineation process can take some time, depending on the size of the area being delineated and the computer being used. Once TauDEM has finished delineation, the cells accumulating the flow will appear.

   
9. When TauDEM is finished running, click Close to exit the Model Wrapper dialog.

TauDEM is part of the Community Edition of WMS, so you can try out this feature today.

A beta version of GMS 10.3, the next version of GMS, has been posted on our downloads page. This release includes a new model interface (MT3D-USGS), a much improved model interface (mod-PATH3DU), and lots of other enhancements, many of which were specifically requested by users. The full list of What's New can be found on the wiki, but here's a brief summary of some of the more noticeable changes.

Bigger icons for hi-res displays

One of the most immediately noticeable changes will be the new icons. The icons in GMS looked very small on some newer, higher resolution displays, so we've added larger versions of all the icons and GMS automatically switches to use the larger icons when it is run on a hi-res device. This effort involved an overhaul of almost all of our icons and some of them look noticeably different.

MT3D-USGS

This is a new model from the USGS which includes, among other things, transport calculations through the unsaturated-zone. GMS 10.3 includes an interface to MT3D-USGS and the interface is similar to those of the other flavors of MT3DMS.

mod-PATH3DU

The mod-PATH3DU interface has been improved and taken out of beta. Support for mod-PATH3DU version 1.1.0 including the new Waterloo method was added, as well as support for specifying DefaultIFACE, a model checker and a model wrapper, and the ability to create starting locations using a UGrid. More export options were also added including exporting pathlines to a shapefile.

MODFLOW Support

The USGS recently released the next version of MODFLOW, MODFLOW 6, in beta and we are working hard to add support for it in the next version of GMS. For GMS version 10.3, however, the only MODFLOW 6 support is the ability to open a MODFLOW discretization file (.dis) and create a UGrid. Look for a more complete interface in the next version.

We've added the ability to create a CLN (connected linear network) from a shapefile. The CLN process is part of MODFLOW-USG but up until now it has not been easy to create this data in GMS. Using a 2D or 3D shapefile, GMS can automatically intersect the shapefile with the grid and create the CLN data. A new tutorial was created to demonstrate how this is done.

Prior to version 10.3, GMS did not calculate the flow between zones or between selected cells for MODFLOW-USG models as it did with other versions of MODFLOW. This has now been implemented for MODFLOW-USG.

The DISU package data was being recalculated every time the model was saved, even if nothing had changed. This data can take a long time to calculate and save, so now GMS 10.3 will only recalculate the data if it needs to due to a change. For models that were created outside of GMS, the DISU data is never recalculated because the unstructured grids are often not suitable for these types of calculations (ie. vertices are not shared). The result is that these models are better supported in GMS because GMS no longer overwrites the correct DISU data with garbage data.

UGrids

Each UGrid can now have it's own display options. All of the UGrids are now listed in the Display Options dialog. Default UGrid display options are also available, which new UGrids inherit from. Options for one UGrid can be copied to other UGrids.

The ability to split a UGrid layer has been added, and is similar to this feature for 3D Grids.

As mentioned in a previous blog post, a new feature called "Notes" has been added which allows you to add notes to almost any object, including the project itself. This is meant to help document the modeling process as the model is being built. GMS can also automatically create notes about how new items were created. Notes include a timestamp indicating when the note was created.

Many other enhancements are included in GMS 10.3, including four new tutorials and lots of user requests. Some things are still not fully tested or complete, hence the "beta" status, but you are welcome to download GMS 10.3 and give it a try. Your feedback is welcome at support@aquaveo.com.

It's been awhile since we posted any sprint reports, but that doesn't mean we've been enjoying a long vacation. GMS 10.3 is getting close to being done and the list of new features has been put on the wiki. There are a number of MODFLOW improvements, support for MT3D-USGS, major improvements to mod-PATH3DU (particle tracking for unstructured grids) and lots of other things including many user requests.

One user requested feature that will be in GMS 10.3 is the ability to add notes in various places in GMS. Notes can be added to objects like UGrids and coverages or to the project itself to help model developers remember where things came from or why they did things the way they did. GMS adds some notes automatically, like when an object is created from another object, like Map -> UGrid. All the notes can be shown, or just the user-created notes, or just the GMS-created notes. Here is an example of what it will look like.