From industry articles to regulatory agency reviews, civil engineers across the world can feel confident with the modeling capabilities that our RiverCAD engineering software provides.

Here, in our office, we do lots of floodplain studies to design and evaluate flood-control structures. We’ve used RiverCAD extensively for those areas for close to 10 years. If you put enough cross sections close together, you start to get a pretty good picture of the river’s profile. So if you have a tool like RiverCAD that makes it easier to extract the required data, such as the elevation models, contours and topologies, you can put more cross sections together. That’s a very time-consuming thing to do by hand.

As its name aptly implies, this is a CAD program concerned with rivers. BOSS International is the name of the company in Wisconsin that produces it. Its main purpose is to facilitate the analysis of natural run-off conditions over an area of terrain, including stream flow volumes and their routes, and to model impounding areas. Analyzing stream flows is a vital precursor to designing road work embankments, culverts and bridges, and of course dams. Since RiverCAD works from terrain data in 3D computer model form it follows that it is relatively simple to modify the terrain as might be proposed for some structures or earth works and be able to analyze the resulting modified flow or impounding conditions.

To evaluate new flow conditions and the extent of the floodplain after regrading of the land surface, the authors performed surface water flow modeling to delineate 2-, 5-, 10-, 25-, 50-, and 100-year flood events using both the pre- and post- restoration topography. Procedures used for the modeling are described in this paper.

The past number of years within the state has seen an overhaul and generally a betterment of the Irish construction industry towards sustainable development; in the context of RiverCAD this includes assessing impacts and formulating mediating measures against the impacts on rivers and catchments. The effects of development on an existing watercourse are now routinely requested as part of requests for further information during development planning.

In answer to your inquiry regarding hydrologic software; the South Florida Water Management District has not established a process where proprietary software is evaluated and subsequently endorsed or otherwise generally deemed acceptable for use in the Environmental Resource Permit program. Determining the appropriate use of any modeling tool used to design and analyze a water management system proposed in an Environmental Resource Permit application is the responsibility of the particular State of Florida registered professional engineer. It is that individual engineers’ responsibility to select the hydrologic software program that will provide the results commensurate with the intended objective.

The City of Tucson Transportation Engineering Floodplain has used BOSS RiverCAD XP and found it acceptable in modeling riverine systems in the City of Tucson.

I have reviewed your RiverCAD software and found it to be accurate and fast. It is certainly acceptable for use on any project submitted for review in the State of Montana.

FEMA Memorandum "Policy for Accepting GIS Tools for Flood Hazard Mapping in the NFIP," dated August 27, 2001, includes RiverCAD and StormNET computer software as acceptable for use in the NFIP (National Flood Insurance Program) flood hazard mapping program. As discussed in Category 1 of the FEMA Memorandum, RiverCAD and StormNET can function independently from computer models already on the accepted models list as pre-processing and post-processing automation tools, and are acceptable.