With the dynamic nature of COVID19 restrictions across much of the globe, and significant flood events seemingly occurring "all the time", the ability to access our flooding data from anywhere has never been more important.
There are really only two ways to achieve this: making your data physically portable, or making it virtually portable. And by portable, we are not only referring to being portable for you, but also portable for others. For example, how can someone else access your datasets?
Making your data physically portable involves copying it to a hard drive/USB stick and posting or taking it with you. This means considerable delays in copying and introduces data currency risks associated with the fact that there are now multiple copies of your datasets. As your team grows, the viability of this approach dwindles as everyone takes their own copy of the data.
To make your data virtually portable, you could make copies of your datasets available for download. Whilst this may seem like an improvement over physically copying, it still has the same limitations in terms of data currency risks and in the time taken for upload/download.
The ideal means of making your data truly portable is to not actually move it anywhere at all. Maintaining a central location in which your data is stored but facilitating access to it provides a far superior approach.
This is the approach that waterRIDE CLOUD takes. With datasets stored centrally (either on the Cloud or on-premise), your browser is used to run waterRIDE and access information without actually transferring any data.
This means that despite your data being, potentially, several terabytes, access is instant and fast, from wherever it is you may be working.
Controlled sharing opens up a new world of collaboration opportunities, both inside and outside of your organisation, and ensures that the information you share is usable.
Just imagine being able to allow the SES or Police to access your information during a flood event, or allowing a consultant to use your flood studies to establish consistent boundary conditions for a developers flood model.
A growing number of organisations are enjoying the ease and flexibility of using and sharing their flooding data on the Cloud, providing seamless access from both the office and at home.
This is a real shift that the Cloud offers our industry, and it's certainly something worth some serious thought.
Have you ever found yourself wanting to switch to street map based background imagery instead of your aerials?
This has been available in waterRIDE for quite some time but it required you to setup additional views, with some based on Aerials, and others based on the street map.
With version 10.0.80, we are releasing a really easy way to implement this using an Image Toggle layer.
An Image Toggle layer allows you to specify any number of image layers that can be toggled by selecting them from a dropdown list.
This functionality is available in both Manager and Viewer with the only caveat being that you will need to ensure that all layers have their projection specified, as most StreetMap services use the Web Mercator projection, meaning your datasets will be preojected on the fly.
We are putting the finishing touches on our next release, 10.0.80.
Those with valid annual maintenance plans will soon receive an email with download links for our latest release.
Some of the key enhancements include:
- Web-based license server for waterRIDE Classic users
- Background Image Toggle
- Flood forecasting: expanded logging, last run parameters, default rain gauge window
- Flood certificates: text field nested tags
- Speed enhancement for rotated/reprojected grids using pyramids
- Support for 3Di model results
Our offices will be closed from 24th December, 2021, and reopening on 4th January, 2022. Several staff have leave planned over January so you may find it easiest to send any emails to waterRIDE@worley.com.
We hope you have a safe and relaxing break, and we look forward to sharing some great new innovations with you in the new year.