Automated Hydraulic Analysis: Strengths and Weaknesses

The steps required to develop and implement hydraulic modeling are tedious and labor-intensive. Not only are the tasks needed to collect and analyze this data cumbersome, but they are riddled with opportunities for human error. Due to these facts, the automation of hydraulic model development and implementation has been a topic of interest in the H&H community in recent years. The development of a user-friendly and relatively inexpensive Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, have provided a medium for automated hydraulic analysis, thus a series of tools have been developed recently utilizing this technology. One of these tools is HEC-GeoRas, which is an extension for the ESRI ArcView environment that was developed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers to automate the development process of HEC-RAS modeling. This paper will focus on a case example which utilized this extension. The steps needed to develop and implement a hydraulic model are: