Community Model Concept and Implementation in the Surface Water Modeling System

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has begun an initiative called regional sediment management that promotes consideration of multi-project engineering and environmental benefits within sediment-sharing water bodies. Often, multiple navigation, environmental enhancement, and shore-protection projects reside within the same physical system, such as a watershed with its coastal segments between inlets, rivers, bays, and estuaries. Consideration of regional processes streamlines the study, design, and execution of projects. Further, it minimizes unintended consequences at locations beyond the formal limits of a directly authorized (local) project. In support of this initiative, the Corps' Coastal Inlets Research Program and Regional Sediment Management Program are developing informatics infrastructure within the Surface-water Modeling System (SMS) to input, manage, archive, visualize, and output model-related data of various types, including input geometry, hydraulic data, model specific parameters, and metadata or documentation. The "Community Model" concept refers to the capability of archiving all data pertinent to a region in an accessible, sharable and self documenting way. This data includes measured quantities such as raw geometric survey data, decimated data, and observed hydraulic conditions which can be used both as model forcing and model verification data. It also includes model grids and meshes for representing various processes and multiple design scenarios, model parameters, and model solution data. Finally it also includes relational information defining how various local models interact such as circulation, surface waves, and sediment transport. The Community Model concept provides much greater flexibility, portability and economy. The files are portable across operating systems and languages. Various types of data are contained in a single file, and that file is binary with compression capabilities to minimize its size. Further, any of the data can be accessed quickly with a variety of data mining techniques for fast utilization and management.