WMS:Introduction to WMS

WMS is a comprehensive environment for hydrologic analysis. It was developed by the Environmental Modeling Research Laboratory of Brigham Young University in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station and is currently being developed by Aquaveo LLC.

WMS offers state of the art tools to perform automated basin delineation and to compute important basin parameters such as area, slope and runoff distances. It also serves as a graphical user interface for several hydraulic and hydrologic models. With its management of coordinate systems, WMS is capable of displaying and overlaying data in real world coordinates. The program also provides many display tools for viewing terrain surfaces and exporting images for reports and presentations.

All of the former models (HEC-1, TR-55, TR-20, Rational, NFF, HMS, OC Hydrology, MODRAT) are still supported with version 8.1, with the additions of a complete SWMM interface and a much improved and fully functional interface to a spatially distributed model, GSSHA (formerly CASC2D). The WMS hydraulic interface was also updated in WMS 8.1 making it compatible with HEC-RAS 4.0 beta. The RAS model can be run as steady state or unsteady and results used to delineate floodplain extents and animations of flood waves for complete floodplain analysis. WMS 8.1 has also integrated an improved hydraulic toolbox and incorporated the latest release of the widely used Federal Highways culvert design model, HY-8.

New users may want to become oriented to WMS by following the WMS Quick Tour.

Related Topics

• WMS Basic Modeling Concepts
• DEM Guidelines
• TIN Guidelines
• Feature Object Guidelines
• ArcView Data Guidelines