waterRIDE has been relied upon as a flood forecasting tool for almost 20 years. In that time, the capability of the waterRIDE framework has continued to expand covering riverine flooding, flash flooding, storm surge, dam outflows and a combination of all.
The focus of waterRIDE's forecasting approach has always been to leverage your existing datasets, so you might be surprised to know that you probably already have everything you need to setup your own system.
In fact, if an external agency provides forecasts at gauges on your catchment, you can setup a very effective system using just the outputs of a flood study. Many users find this an excellent way to convert the Bureau's point-based forecasts into flood maps, surfaces, and flood intelligence to help them quantify the impact of impending flooding and plan their reponses.
The recent floods across the eastern seaboard saw many systems "operational" with unanimously positive feedback and one user even using the word "perfect" to describe the systems performance. We have done our own performance comparisons and look forward to sharing these with you in an upcoming webinar.
Systems were run across various levels of Government with waterRIDE CLOUD proving an excellent way to access the forecasts and likely impacts from anywhere. Some upcoming features including the one touch sharing button will add to the flexibility of this approach.
Complimenting flood forecasting in waterRIDE, we are also excited to release our new forecast data packs, which can be used to both interrogate and visualise temporal rainfall forecasts, drive real-time hydrology based flash flood forecasting systems, and aggregate disparate forecast/actual datasets into a single location.
The data packs provide interrogatable access to a range of short and long term (out to 7 days) BoM based forecast/actual rainfall and catchment soil moisture conditions datasets to help you "get ahead" of impending flooding, understand the likely impacts, and effectively plan your response.
These data packs are available to both waterRIDE CLOUD and Classic users and provide an excellent way to expand your warning time for impending rainfall and to drive your own fllood forecasting system.
Further details are available here.
Working with street maps (Google, BING, Open Street Maps etc) has become common place amongst the general community.
But, working with streetmaps has traditionally involved an inherent slowness as our massive flooding datasets were reprojected onto the common Web Mercator projection.
Our professional experiences, therefore, have often been limited to aerial imagery which is fast and provides valuable detail, but sometimes loses context, especially when we are interfacing with the community.
With our new Rapid Reproject algorithm (v10.0.85 and higher), you can work with Street Maps as quickly as you do aerial imagery, opening up a whole new world of communication possibilities.
As communities increasingly use StreetMaps in their daily lives, they make an ideal backdrop for communicating our complex flooding datasets.
Given that a StreetMap background image is already familiar to the community, they can focus on understanding what the "flood map" is trying to convey, rather than trying to orientate themselves.
You can even include this imagery in your automated flood certificates system for broader scale images (a zoomed in StreetMap is very plain).
At present, supported StreetMaps sources are (configure using GIS->Database Layers):
- Open Street Maps (via WMS)
- BING Maps (will need to obtain an API key from Microsoft - free in some cases)
- Any corporate datasets via WMS/WMTS
Combined with an ImageToggle layer, a user can easily switch between StreetMap and Aerial backdrops, providing flexibility to use the imagery that best suits their purpose at the time.
The rapid reproject algorithm only operates on grids files (*.wrr), but applies for any reprojection such as from GDA94 to GDA2020, or from NZMG to NZTM.
A few weeks ago Cameron hosted a webinar addressing some of the key points to consider when sharing your flooding information.
The webinar covered:
- Why share datasets?
- Barriers to sharing
- Sharing data vs sharing access to data
- Controlling access and security
- Usability of our shared data
- Sharing with different types of users
If you missed it, you can watch a recording here.
A few of you already know that we have developed a web-based license server (thank you to our beta testers!) and we are now excited to announce its formal release.
Designed to simplify licensing, the web-based license server operates in the same way as the on-prem license server, except that it runs on our cloud servers, meaning your IT no longer needs to administer it.
A license server allows you to share your current waterRIDE (Classic) licenses with others within your organisation. The number of concurrent users is limited to the number of licenses held of each product.
To transition, send us an email (waterRIDE@worley.com) and we'll organise a license file for you. Add that file to your waterRIDE (Classic) installation folder and waterRIDE will automatically connect to the licensing server over the internet.
License server fees remain the same and there is no cost to transition from an existing on-prem license server.
For those not using a license server, contact us to find out how it could make your waterRIDE usage much more flexible.
We are eagerly awaiting the opportunity to catch up with as many of you as possible at the upcoming FMA conference in Toowoomba (17th - 20th May, 2022).
Please drop by our trade booth for an informal catchup and we can show you some of the exciting functionality and capability we have in the works.