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waterRIDE™ Data Manager is a module within Flood Manager and its purpose is to assist organisations with large amounts of flood modelling and associated data in managing and controlling the data for use by staff within the organisation.

Typically, raw flood modelling results are converted into waterRIDE™ surface files where they can be cleaned from modelling irregularities and enhanced with more detailed terrain data amongst other processing. Once this processing is complete the surfaces can be made available to others in the organisation who need to interrogate flood information. In a similar fashion to GIS, waterRIDE™ surfaces comprise a family of files that work together and because they encompass time varying spatial data with many attributes, the files can be quite large.

If used appropriately, Data Manager should avoid the plethora of portable hard drives that floodplain engineers often accumulate, by consolidating the large number of files and quantity of data on a network or cloud based server.

Flood studies are often updated or revised when landscape or built environment changes affect flooding behaviour, or as flood modelling  techniques improve over time. Flood related planning disputes are tied to the flood information available at the time the planning decision was made and it is often difficult to access old flood information that was current in the past. Data Manager enables existing studies to be archived as updated versions become adopted using more cost effective storage options for the large amounts of data. In the case of disputes, Data Manager can identify the history of flood studies at a location and temporarily rollback the relevant study data so that it can be interrogated and the dispute resolved.

Data Manager's centralised repository of terabytes of data across hundreds or thousands of files provides significant benefits to custodians and users of the data. User access and work flow can be simplified and streamlined in a number of ways:

oend users with little GIS or flood expertise can readily access current flood information from a central list of waterRIDE™ projects using Flood Viewer,

oflood engineers can generate derived and enhanced flood products and publish them with Data Manager for use elsewhere within or outside the organisation,

oa single point of truth for all flood studies can be provided through a mosaic master grid surface that encompasses all the current study data,

oexternal modelling consultants can be provided with an extract from current waterRIDE™ projects to facilitate localised flood assessments,

olocalised flood models can be easily merged back into the base study data,