The Federal Interagency Sedimentation and Hydrologic Modeling Conference (SEDHYD) has come and gone, held as usual in Reno, NV. While I wasn’t able to attend, I did submit two papers to the conference. The first paper is all about using HEC-WAT and HEC-RAS-Sediment to evaluate the effect of hydrologic uncertainty on bed evolution. I posted about this project a little while ago, but I focused on the R code used to generate some of the figures and didn’t go into much detail on how the data for these figures was generated. This short paper goes into more detail about how HEC-WAT and HEC-RAS can be used together to quantify the effect of two main sources of morphological uncertainty—flow magnitude and timing—on flood risk. If you’re interested in doing uncertainty modeling with HEC-RAS, this paper is a good introduction to tools provided by HEC.

The second paper focuses on modeling bank migration on the Missouri River with HEC-RAS. I spent a lot of time working on the Bank Stability and Toe Erosion Model (BSTEM) during my time at HEC, and this paper covers a major application—probably the largest RAS-BSTEM model to date—and discusses calibration approaches and lessons learned. If you’re planning on doing bank failure and migration modeling with HEC-RAS, it’s worth a read!