EuroRAS 2018: Upcoming courses in Munich and Paris + new HEC-RAS developments across Europe

Written by Krey Price  |  Surface Water Solutions
Copyright © The RAS Solution 2018.  All rights reserved.

With European teams having dominated the final rounds of this year's World Cup, and with the World Cup having dominated European headlines for the last few months, we thought it would be a good time to highlight some of the recent HEC-RAS developments across Europe!

HEC-RAS authors and developers Gary Brunner and Cameron Ackerman have just returned from a whirlwind trip to Europe, where they taught a well-attended London course hosted by JBA for the third straight year. In addition to the singular opportunity to interact directly with the developers themselves, attendees were treated to poster presentations about recent international HEC-RAS projects along with the chance to cheer on their favorite World Cup teams from the nearby pubs in the evenings! Read more details about the course and register your interest for next year’s London training with the links in this article by JBA’s Frank O’Connell.

HEC's Gary Brunner and Cameron Ackerman conducting HEC-RAS training in London

As for any other European HEC-RAS fans who missed out on the training, don’t fret – there are still some additional opportunities to catch up with courses across Europe this year:

• The Technical University of Munich will be the venue for the first German HEC-RAS course, which (entirely by coincidence) happens to coincide with Oktoberfest...where the Germans may still be drinking away their sorrows after their early elimination in the group stage! Register your interest for the 24-25 September 2018 Munich course here.

• The first HEC-RAS 5 course in France (at least as far as we’re aware) will also be held in September at G2C Ingénierie in Paris...where the World Cup victory celebrations may well still be going on! Registration details for the 27-28 Paris course can be found here.
  

Both courses will be taught in English to facilitate international attendees and will highlight all of the latest additions to HEC-RAS, so why not pack your bags for a European Vacation and get your certified PDH hours to boot!

In other news across Europe, HEC-RAS is still getting lots of use in Italy following Chris Goodell’s 2015 course which attracted over 40 attendees and was hosted by Antonio Cotroneo. Chris has just returned from some HEC-RAS consulting work in Portugal and he gave a presentation "Adventures in HEC-RAS Modeling" to his Alma Mater IHE-Delft in The Netherlands.  Chris and Antonio are planning a follow-up to the Italian course in Milan next year; stay tuned for further details!

We do expect to see increasing use of HEC-RAS across Europe going forward, especially now that Flood Modeller, which was originally developed in the U.K. and is very commonly used across Europe, has been updated to allow cloud computing for HEC-RAS. Watch the free webinar by Jon Wicks here to find out more on the topic.

In another European connection, the U.K. Environment Agency benchmarking tests have become standard protocol for comparing results and capabilities of a range of 2D modeling packages, including the most commonly used European models; although the original studies were conducted before HEC-RAS had 2D capabilities, HEC-RAS has now been tested against all of the applicable European benchmarking models. As shown in Gary Brunner’s HEC-RAS Benchmarking report, HEC-RAS provides consistent results on par with the other tested models and is now receiving increasing recognition across Europe for its speed and accuracy.

We've also been very excited to hear about the growing use of HEC-RAS on major European projects. The hydraulic modeling team at the Sarajevo-based HEIS group, for example, is currently using HEC-RAS 1D and 2D to undertake floodplain modelling of nearly 5,000 km of river length in areas identified as being under high flood risk in Bosnia and Herzogovinia. I was thrilled to spend a few days in Sarajevo helping to kick off the project earlier this month, and I look forward to further developments.

The modeling team at the Hydro-Engineering Institute Sarajevo

If you are aware of other major projects across Europe or elsewhere around the globe that have been using HEC-RAS, we'd love to hear about them and to feature the findings and lessons learned here on the blog.  

In the meantime, we hope to see you in Europe in September!

[And on behalf of the International Community of Freeloaders, I’d like to personally express my thanks to the U.S. taxpayers who - despite a few shortcomings on the world soccer scene - continue to fund HEC-RAS as a great modeling tool!  J Given the pace of recent advances, I can only imagine what HEC-RAS will be capable of in a few short years - and who knows, maybe we can at least hope for a U.S. showing in Qatar 2022 as well! ]