Day One: March 15, 2006

Day Two: March 16, 2006

Friday March 17, 2006 Short Courses
Short Courses: $50 each

Short Courses are offered Friday after the conference to further explore technical issues surrounding certain conference topics.

Courses are held at Rice University's Mechanical Laboratory.



1. Radar Rainfall and Geographic Information Systems in Hydrology
Instructors: Baxter E. Vieux and Philip B. Bedient

March 17, 08:00 a.m. - noon

The course will introduce modern concepts of radar rainfall and advanced hydrologic modeling for watershed analysis and floodplain prediction in urban settings.

Topics include:

1. Orient the professional engineer and planner to uses of radar rainfall and GIS
2. Understand the utility and limitations of available radar/gage data sets
3. Planning effective rainfall runoff monitoring systems – Rainfall and USGS gages
4. Use of geospatial data for hydrologic models – Lidar, Radar, Soils, Land use
5. Hydrologic modeling applications using radar rainfall
6. Flood Alert Systems

March 17, 08:00 a.m. - noon

Watershed modeling is an essential tool for flood plain management, defining flood plains, modeling historic storm/flood events, planning, and impact analyses. This seminar will provide an overview of hydrologic modeling and analysis through the use of HEC-HMS. Attendees will see a demonstration of how to model various hydrologic conditions and situations using HEC-HMS. Attendees will gain an understanding of the reasonableness of the results. In addition, common modeling errors will be discussed along with troubleshooting techniques. In some cases, HEC-HMS may not have been designed to directly analyze difficult modeling situations. Techniques to allow HEC-HMS to emulate these types of situations will also be discussed.

This seminar will also serve to familiarize the attendee with numerous hydrologic options available with the use of HEC-HMS. The hydrologic options include basin losses, rainfall-runoff transformation processes, reach routing, reservoir routing, precipitation modeling, and other options. Model calibration to recorded data will be discussed as well.


3. Introduction to HEC-RAS: Fluid Mechanics without a Wrench
Instructor: Matthew K. Zeve, P.E. is a Project Engineer with Dodson & Associates, Inc.

March 17, 01:00 p.m. - 05:00 p.m.

Open channel hydraulics and water surface profile calculations are essential parts of any flood plain determination and flood study. This seminar will provide an overview of hydraulic modeling and analysis through the use of the HEC-RAS software package. The seminar will focus on demonstrations of creating and reviewing models. This seminar will cover concepts for common hydraulic modeling tasks. These include setting up a HEC-RAS model, introducing the modeling parameters, channel modifications, culvert and bridge modeling, floodway delineation, reviewing results, and output analysis. The use of both the steady and unsteady flow options will be discussed.

HEC-RAS is quickly becoming the primary tool that water resources engineers use for open channel hydraulics and is the software used to map the majority of the floodplains and floodways in the United States. The purpose of this seminar is to gain a working knowledge of commonly used features of the software.