HEC-HMS Exercise for CE374K at University of Texas at Austin



Introduction to HEC-HMS 3.5

from an earlier document

by Prof. David R. Maidment and Prof. Seth Ahrens, University of Texas

Minor modifications for version 3.5 by Prof. Charles L. Smart, Kean University

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Table of Contents

• Goals of the Exercise

• Obtaining the Program and the Data

• Procedure

o 1. Importing a Basin Model

o 2. Editing a Basin Model

o 3. Creating a Precipitation Model

o 4. Defining the Control Specifications

o 5. Executing an HEC-HMS Model

o 6. Viewing HMS Results

• Be Creative!! (Waller Creek diversion tunnel design discharge)

• Cleaning Up

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Goals of the Exercise

The intent of this exercise is to introduce you to the structure and some of the functions of the HEC-Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS), by simulating the runoff hydrographs resulting from a design storm on Waller Creek in Austin, Texas. 

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Obtaining the Program and the Data

The HEC-HMS program can be obtained from the Hydrologic Engineering Center's home page at:

The program runs on Windows 95, NT , Windows 7 and Unix platforms.  A user's manual is also available at this location. 

To run the model for Waller Creek, a basin file is needed to specify the physical parameters of the watershed, and a map file to give the outline of the drainage areas and creeks.  These files be downloaded as a zip file: waller.zip.  Make a working directory on your computer and download this file into it, then right click on it and Extract all files.

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Procedure

You may start the HMS by clicking

Start/Programs/HEC-HMS

After a few seconds, a window similar to the following image should appear:

Click New, and the Project Definition Window will appear. Henceforth, this image will be referred to as the Project Definition.  A Project in HMS refers to all of the data sets associated with a particular model. In this case, the Project is called waller, which is short for Waller Creek in Austin, Texas. The Description bar underneath the Project name allows you to type a detailed name for the actual short Project name. If desired, you may click on the ellipsis to the right of the Description bar, and additional space for you to type a lengthy Description will appear. For future reference, any time you see an ellipsis in a window in the HMS, it means you may access additional space for writing descriptive text.

Enter the project name waller. Note the location of your new project files: mine is in my Documents under the new folder waller. Click Create.

Take a look in the Components menu item, there are three items: the Basin Model, the Precipitation Model, and the Control Specifications. Each component represents a different element of the model. The Basin Model, for instance, contains information relevant to the physical attributes of the model, such as basin areas, river reach connectivity, or reservoir data. Likewise, the Precipitation Model holds rainfall data. Finally, the Control Specifications section contains information pertinent to the timing of the model such as when a storm occurred and what type of time interval you want to use in the model. Each of the sections is explored below individually. 

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1. Importing a Basin Model

To create a hydrologic model of Waller Creek, we need to import the basin file that you just downloaded in the .zip file. Copy the basin and map files to the waller folder.

In the HMS Project window, use File/Import/Basin Model/ to import the basin model from the Documents directory waller.  You'll see the Basin window open up and some icons appear.  Select View / Background Maps / select waller, change the format to HMS map file *.map, and select Hms.map  You should now see a schematic of Waller Creek showing the watershed and stream map and an overlay of the hydrologic elements, shown to the right

The tool bar at the top of the display shows the seven hydrologic elements contained in HEC-HMS. 

They are:

[pic]  Subbasin - rainfall-runoff computation on a watershed

[pic]  River reach - routing of flows from one end of a reach to the other

[pic] Reservoir - routing of flows through a level-pool reservoir

[pic] Junction - combination of flows from upstream reaches and subbasins

[pic] Diversion - abstraction of flow from the stream This is the Schematic Window

[pic] Source - inflow of water from a stream crossing the boundary of the modeled region

[pic] Sink - outflow of water in a stream crossing the boundary of the modeled region (basin outlet)

The model of Waller Creek shown above contains only 4 of these kinds of elements.  There are 19 hydrologic elements in the model, made up of 7 subbasins, 6 river reaches, 5 junctions, and 1 sink at the point where Waller Creek flows into the Colorado River.  Notice that when a stream flows through a watershed, the additional local runoff from the drainage area around the stream is not accounted for until the downstream end of the reach where its flow is combined at a junction with the flow coming from the upstream reach. 

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To screen-capture an image,  do the following:

• Make sure the Schematic is the top window in your terminal.

• Depress "Ctrl-Print Screen" on your keyboard. This captures the image on your screen and places it on the clipboard.

• Open Paint using Start/Programs/Accessories/Paint.

• In Paint, select Paste from the Edit menu. After a few seconds, the screen image should appear in the Paint window.

• Directly under the word "File" in the Paint menu, there is a dotted rectangle. Make sure this button is depressed. Enlarge the Paint window so you can see all of the basin map. Make a rectangle around the basin map by holding down the left mouse button and dragging. When you have completed the rectangle, let go of the mouse button; your dotted rectangle around the basin map should remain.

• Under Edit in the Paint menu, select Copy To. We are now going to save the basin map to a file.

• Change the Save as type: bar to 24 Bitmap. Type in a file name and save the file somewhere in your account.

• Open Microsoft Word.

• From the main menu in Word, select Insert/Picture/From File. Retrieve the basin image you just saved in Paint. The image should appear in your Word window.

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2. Editing a Basin Model

After first making sure that the [pic] is depressed, in the Schematic, click on the icon which represents basin 12 with the left mouse button. After this icon is highlighted, hold down the right mouse button and choose Edit from the pop-up menu that appears. In the upper-right-hand corner of the Subbasin Editor window that will appear, you will find the the area of sub-basin 12 (3.602 sq. km). Make a note of this value. Go ahead and look up the areas of the other sub-basins as well. HMS can work with a Basin file in either SI or English units.  In this case, the file is in SI units.

What is the total drainage area of Waller Creek catchment (sq. km)?

Returning to the HMS, focus your attention on the Schematic window. This window contains a variety of buttons which you may use to assemble and view a basin model. First, consider the top row of buttons. The [pic] button allows you to select (highlight) items in the model. You may also use the [pic] button to drag-and-drop hydrologic elements from the left-hand-side of the window or to move individual elements within the model. If you have a model element highlighted, hold down the right mouse button and select Edit from the pop-up menu to view its properties. The [pic] button allows you to move (or pan) the entire model display by holding down the left mouse button and moving the mouse. If you wish to zoom in, you may do so by depressing the [pic] button and selecting a rectangular area in the model to zoom in to by holding down the left mouse button and dragging the mouse to draw a rectangle. To zoom out, use the menu File, Zoom Out commands. Go ahead and experiment with these to understand better how each works.

The primary function of a surface-water model such as the HMS involves three sets of calculations--quantifying rainfall losses into the soil, converting excess rainfall to runoff, and routing. As part of creating a HMS model, the selection of the processes to be used for each calculation set is made in the Parameters window.

To access this window, select Parameters from the menu. Check the values for Loss (Initial and Constant), Transform (SCS Unit Hydrograph), and Routing (Muskingum).

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The method show in Loss is where you choose the process which calculates the rainfall losses absorbed by the ground. Click on Loss section to see your choices. Some options are SCS Curve No. and Green & Ampt. In this model, Initial and Constant has been selected. This loss relationship means that a quantity of rainfall will be absorbed by permeable soil initially, and a constant rate will be absorbed over the time frame of the model.

STOPPED HERE

Under Transform, you specify how to convert excess rainfall to direct runoff. Again, click the line to view your options, most of which you should recognize. This model employs the SCS technique. The modClark model takes gridded rainfall data, subtracts the losses as specified through the Loss Rates, and converts the excess rainfall to a runoff hydrograph using a variation of what is known as the modified Clark unit hydrograph. You may go elsewhere to learn more about how the modClark method works.

 

The final part of the default methods considers Routing, which is where you specify the process for routing a hydrograph through a river reach. Once again, click the line and look over the choices. The Muskingum is specified here, which is the routing technique used for the reaches in this model.

At this point, close the Parameters window by clicking on Cancel at the bottom of the window. Now that we have considered the various loss, transform, and routing techniques to use, we will look at the actual parameters associated with the chosen techniques. Choose Data-Eds. on the Schematic window menu bar. Your choices should be

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Select Loss Rate and then Initial/Constant first. The following window should appear.

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Note that while the Initial/Constant Loss Rate method was specified via another menu, it is in this table that the method parameters are actually entered. Each basin requires an initial loss quantity, a constant loss rate, and a percent imperviousness.   These values have been selected arbitrarily.  If the % impervious value differs from 0, that % of the land area is assumed to have no losses and the loss method is applied only to the remainder of the drainage area.  Students in the Dept of Geography of the University of Texas at Austin, have studied how the growth of the University has changed the land use patterns over time in Waller Creek.  See:

After you have looked over the data, click OK. For future reference, while both OK and Apply transfer the data to the computer's short-term memory, they differ only in that OK closes the window while Apply keeps the window open.

Once you have closed the Initial/Constant Loss window, choose Data-Eds., Transform, and then SCS to view this image:

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Note that the SCS unit hydrograph method requires only one parameter for each sub-basin--lag time between rainfall and runoff in the subbasin. HMS. At this point, go ahead and close this window.

The next step involves entering the parameters for the routing process. From Data-Eds., select Reach Routing and then Muskingum. This should cause the following image to appear.  This simulation routes the water through the reaches by the Muskingum method in which K is the travel time of a flood wave passing through the reach, X is a measure of the degree of storage (X = 0 means a level-pool reservoir or maximum storage, X = 0.5 means a pure transmission reach in which there are no storage effects, and X ranges between 0 and 0.5).  The reach is divided into a number of subreaches if necessary to keep the computations numerically stable.

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You do not have to go through the Data-Eds. menu to edit element properties. Editing may also be accomplished by highlighting an element, holding down the right mouse button, and choosing Edit from the pop-up menu. Before we move ahead to the precipitation data, close the Lag window and open Subbasin Area/Base Flow from Data-Eds., which should look like this:

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In this part of the HMS, you supply if necessary, information such as basin areas and initial base flows in the system. The recession ratio and threshold Q/ratio to peak values are used by the HMS to add baseflow to direct runoff. In this model we are not allowing for any base flow.  When you are finishing with this window, close it. In addition, you should also close the Schematic window by selecting Close from the File menu.

To be turned in: Choose one of the subwatersheds and one of the river reaches and describe in words what the parameter values are that are used to characterize these features hydrologically. 

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3. Creating a Precipitation Model

Having established the physical aspects of the model, we will now address the rainfall data.  From a statistical study of extreme storm rainfall data recorded at gages, tables and maps have been prepared for the whole US which specify the storm precipitation depth to be expected as a function of the return period of the event and the duration of the rainfall.  A table of such values is shown below for Travis County, in which the City of Austin is located.  For example, for a 10 year return period event, we expect that in 5 min 0.85" of rainfall will fall, in 15 min 1.66", and so on, up to 720 min (12 hours) and 1440 min (24 hours).  These precipitation depths are the values which would be equalled or exceeded on average once in 10 years when considering a very long period of data.  The values shown for Travis County were extracted from a live map server accessible on the CRWR home page .  The values given in this server are precipitation intensities in mm/hr, so they were converted to depths in inches by multiplying by the rainfall duration and converting the resulting depth from mm to inches.   As rainfall duration increases, the cumulative depth of rainfall increases but the average intensity over the duration decreases because severe rainfall cannot be sustained for very long.

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At present, HMS can handle rainfall input only in English units (inches).  To create a design precipitation input file, go to the Project Window and select Edit/Precipitation Model/New.  A window like this appears in which you can describe the precipitation file you intend to create, in this case for a 10 year storm.

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After clicking, OK, the following window appears, in which you should select the Frequency-Based Hypothetical Storm, as shown.  The other options refer to different methods of inputting the precipitation data, including Grid-based Precipitation which comes from Nexrad radar.

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When you click on Ok, the following table appears.  Fill in the values shown from the table above for a 10 year storm (10% chance of being equalled or exceeded in any year).  Click Apply, and then Ok to complete this step.

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 For each project, the HMS then creates an output Data Storage System DSS file which stores calculated data from all runs for a given project so that results from a previous run can be directly compared to results from a more current run. The HMS stores data in the DSS file according to the information given in the Pathnames section. F: is left blank because the HMS will place the name of the run there.

To be turned in: a screen capture of the design precipitation input file

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4. Defining the Control Specifications

The final piece of the model setup involves establishing the model's time limits. Go back to the Project Definition and select Edit/Control Specifications/New.  The following window will appear in which you can label the specifications.

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After you click Ok, you'll get the window to specify the duration of the simulation in date and time, and also the time interval of the calculations (10 minutes).  In this case, the duration is arbitrary, long enough to depict the runoff from a 1-day storm, but the 10 minute time interval is part of the Basin file model setup and should remain fixed for this Waller Creek model.

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To be turned in: how many time intervals of computation will be performed?

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5. Executing an HMS Model

Finally, you have finished perusing the data involved in creating the Tenkiller model. To run the model, go the HMS Schematic window and select Run Configuration from the Simulate menu. The following window should appear.  Click on each of the three boxes to highlight and select them, hit Add to record these as the files to be used for Run 1, and Close the window.  The three subsections in this window list the physical, rainfall, and timing data sets that have been created for this project. Though this model only has one data set in each section, the HMS is slick in that it allows the user to have multiple data sets available to include conveniently in different runs.

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When finished, select Add, close the Run Configuration window, go back to the Project Definition, and choose Simulation Manager from the Simulate menu. You should see an image similar to this:

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The Simulation Manager summarizes which Basin ID, Precip ID, and Control ID have been chosen for each run. In this window, Run 1 is composed of the three sets you just chose in the Run Configuration window. For the moment of truth, select Compute; if all goes well, you should see

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If you do not see this window, problems have arisen.   If so, HMS gives  a list of problem locations and by editing the Basin file you may be able to eliminate them. 

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6. Viewing HMS Results

The HMS allows you to view results in tabular or graphical form. To view a global results table, go to the Project Definition and double-click WallerCk.1 . From the window which appears (the Schematic window), go to View and choose [pic].   You'll get a window like that shown below which summarizes the peak discharge and time, the total volume of storm runoff and the drainage area from which it came.

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In addition to viewing global results, you may also view results for each element within the model. To do this, choose [pic] in the Schematic window, select an element in the model (Colorado River for example) with the left mouse button, hold down the right mouse button, and choose View Results from the pop-up menu which appears. Pick from Graph, Summary Table, and Time-series Table. If you view the Graph for Colorado River, you should see the following:

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The light red hydrograph is the inflow data from the small area of Waller Creek immediately upsterm of the Colorado River which is added to the routed flow in the channel to produce the total outflow curve.   If you click on a watershed, you see the rainfall at the top and the runoff at the bottom:

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To be turned in: Make a table showing the peak discharge in cms at each of the six outlet points on Waller Creek (5 junctions and 1 sink)..  What is the drainage area above each of these points?  What is the peak discharge per unit of drainage area (cms/sq. km) for these points?

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Be Creative!!!

The citizens of Austin approved a bond issue during 1998 which authorizes the City to borrow approximately $25 million for the construction of a flood diversion tunnel for Waller Creek.   At present the 100 year flood plain for the creek covers many city blocks in downtown Austin.  The goal is to make this area safer from floods and also to encourage the development of a river walk area, perhaps similar to that in San Antonio.    Assume that you are the hydrologist whose job it is to determine the design discharge at the inlet point of this tunnel which is just on the downstream side of 15th Street.  At this point an overflow weir will divert a significant part of the flood discharge and convey it to Town Lake in a 20 ft diameter tunnel.

Study the data you are provided and if possible, improve the estimates of % impervious cover on the watershed, and the initial and continuing losses.  The design is to be based on the 100 year design precipitation, not the 10 year storm that you've used up to this point.

To be turned in: a short account of your design discharge study.  What input data values did you use?  What design discharge at 15th St did you obtain?  Show a graph of the discharge hydrograph at 15th St.  How can you check the result to see if it is reasonable? 

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Cleaning Up

Welcome to the end of what I hope gave you more of an insight of how topics we will learn in class. At this point, all you need to do is make sure you have completed the seven turn in assignments for this project. Go ahead and close the HMS by selecting Exit from the File menu in the Project Definition. When the HMS asks you if you want to save the project, choose Forget Changes.

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Go to Dr Maidment's Home Page

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