When I first saw that, I thought HECRAS! Which I am not a fan of, but it is cool when it works.
Cool, NinetyWt, thanks for the info! (And I just got your username now… took me long enough!)
The area to the northwest of you was filled in to create a reservoir? Yeesh. Personally, I’d be calling moving companies. Is there an outlet? Or overflow provision?
To the OP: cool sims. Can the program handle the water flow as you input progressively more complex geography? If it can, would you be willing to devote a few decades of your life to running something spectacular? Hoover dam? Aswan? Three Rivers (or whatever - in China)? Grand Coulee? And you could do something historical, like Johnstown, to check the accuracy of the sim.
Why, yes, I am an engineering geek. Why do you ask?
Great movies.
A friend of mine is a lecturer in geography. For a project for floodplain geography, he collected as many wine bottle corks as he could. They painted them yellow, and waited for a flood. Then they released the corks, and took timelapse long exposure images from an elevated position. The corks become yellow streaks on the photos, the length of which determines the water speed at that point. They could map (and eventually model) the flood event. It’s the sort of data that feeds into the modelling systems that you use.
They had wanted to use yellow plastic ducks, but graduate students feel foolish toting toy ducks around, and the corks are biodegradable.
Si
Having problems with unsteady flow? We’ve developed a few tricks to make it behave. I’ve no problems with it under unsteady flow conditions. I cut my teeth on HEC-2.
Now if I could just figure out what a rugger is ! And a santo. Or, how much santo could a santo rugger rugger if a santo rugger could rugger santos?
Yes, the program could handle more complex geometry, to a degree- there is a maximum number of points per cross section and number of cross sections per model. The procedure within (the actual breaching) is based on measured data, by the way. It’s all empirical.
I don’t know about devoting my life to one project - I have too much fun now with the diversity of work we have. One gets tired of dams after a while. 
There are more complex and accurate modeling programs out there - this one is only a 2D model. Models exist which are 3D and use finite element analysis.
si_blakely that is a neat story. I’d like to see the photos.
Dixon Lake was there long before our house was built. In fact the street we live on isn’t even on that Google maps page. If you look at my link, our house is right about at the north end of that arrow (give or take 50 yards). As far as outlets and overflow provisions go, I have no idea! Probably ought to find out… :eek:
Those are some dam fine analyses.
Thanks
I confess I read the title and was tempted to respond “Only if I can show you my service center breakeven analyses” but then your stuff turned out to be really cool and mine is just dum. 
Well maybe you should break out the fancy charts and graphs and stuffs.
Thanks nd_n8.
I’ll see what I can do when I talk to him next - of course, it may be part of a paper for publication or someones thesis (or even commercial research), so YMMV. I just thought it was a cool way to measure flow.
Of course, for something like a dam break, you are going to need to use barrels, not corks, and practical experimentation is probably discouraged :smack:
Si