When forecasting streamflows, managing water supplies, or making other water resources decisions, the National Weather Service River Forecast System (NWSRFS) is especially advantageous because it can simulate and project conditions continuously in time. This feature provides NWSRFS software with broader applications and more powerful decision-making potential than event-based software.

Part of the flexibility and power of NWSRFS comes from its channel systems applications. These include hydrologic and hydraulic routing methods, an operation to account for channel gains and losses, and two powerful reservoir simulation packages. RTi has extensive experience in applying these software features to a variety of water resources concerns.

At RTi, hydrograph routing in many NWSRFS applications is conducted with the Muskingum method, the Lag/K approach, or the Tatum method. For unsteady flow routing where backwater and storage effects are of major interest, the FLDWAV operation and its accompanying graphics routines has been successfully used. FLDWAV modeling results have been particularly important for RTi projects in Panama, Mexico, and El Salvador. The dambreak routines in FLDWAV have been successfully applied at RTi to analyze hypothetical conditions at Madden Dam in the Panama Canal Zone.

Simulation of single reservoirs, as well as multiple-reservoir systems, has been a major activity at RTi over the past several years. Using the RES-SNGL and RES-J software operations, RTi has developed, calibrated and implemented reservoir models throughout the United States, Mexico, and Central America. These reservoir applications are especially flexible and robust at simulating a wide variety of reservoir management approaches. RTi modeling results have been used for short-term streamflow and flood forecasting systems, longer-term probabilistic forecasts, design and operation of hypothetical reservoirs in planning studies, and decision-support for hydropower and water supply systems.

Alone or in combination, these channel system models can be applied at RTi to forecast or investigate the most challenging water resources systems.