Sophia Buchanan, ANZ Regional Product Lead for Flood Products at Jacobs
Introduction
I recently had the pleasure of joining the Australian Water School (AWS) alongside Blake Boulton from WMS Engineering and Krey Price from the Hydro School to discuss one of my favourite topics: modelling errors and how to avoid them!
With 21 years of modelling experience under his belt, Blake had plenty of stories to share about major modelling errors, their impact on projects, and how he recovered. All his stories were fascinating, and I highly recommend watching the recording. My personal favourite involved a very vocal community member who didn't accept the model results because they didn’t match what he had seen – “The flows didn’t come from the direction you say it did, and it was red water first and then brown”. Blake knew better than to ignore local experience but couldn't get the model to match the behaviour described by the community member. Years later, more lidar became available and the model was extended. The newly extended model showed the exact behaviour described – a breakout in flows that went through a watermelon farm containing red dirt, explaining the coloured flows red first, then brown just as they had described.
As part of the webinar, I showed the power of Flood Platform for performing sensibility checks on flood models. It provides the right information in the right format without the need to install complex desktop applications or open Microsoft Excel and create custom graphs. It is simple to use and provides tools to playback flood simulations, plot time-varying results, display a simulation health dashboard, and track comments/notes as you perform the review.
“Managers can save a lot of time (and money) by picking up problems early and being able to talk to the modeller about them. It’s so powerful having access to visual results in Flood Platform, being able to play through the simulation and since we aren’t always together, being able to comment on potential problems for review.”
Blake Boulton, Director WMS Engineering
Attendees found the conversation refreshing and appreciated the honesty around past mistakes—yes, even engineers make mistakes! Many shared that they too had made mistakes and had felt isolated in them.
There are many detailed checklists and hundreds of model outputs available for reviewing flood models, but often it’s the simple common-sense checks that prove most important, such as:
Have you got the right model/results?
Do flows go where you expect them to?
Are the flows reasonable?
Are the volumes sensible?
Does the model represent the ground conditions?
Is the simulation healthy?
We all shared quick tips for checking for modelling errors, and we also had attendees share theirs. We’ve compiled a list of these which has been shared along with the recording:
Catch the webinar recording here
Compiled tips and tricks here
Sophia Buchanan
Sophia is the ANZ Product Lead for Flood Products at Jacobs. Growing up surrounded by waterways on Australia’s coastline, Sophia is passionate about supporting peers in ANZ with technology that solves water problems.