HydroMT – Model Building and analysis
Modellers have always struggled with a lack of local data to build models, whilst using global datasets can be difficult and time consuming. Furthermore the complexities of combining local and global datasets pose additional hurdles. HydroMT offers a fast and reproducible solution to overcome these obstacles, providing modellers with an efficient way to construct models in both data rich and data poor environments. So you spend significantly less time on model building and instead have more time to analyse results and test mitigation measures. HydroMT is currently available for Deltares’ software for hydrological, hydraulic flood, flood impact and water quality modelling.
HydroMT was built from the very beginning to empower modellers, and Deltares’ commitment to sharing tools and achieving wider impact is reflected in it. Tooling for automated model set up has been used internally in Deltares for several years, with testing and application on international projects. HydroMT brings those tools together making them more accessible for students, researchers and modellers. Its speed of set up and replicability makes it useful for post-disaster assessments, such as the case below for Cyclone Idai in Mozambique.
Features of HydroMT
- HydroMT is a free and open-source tool.
- It is a Python package that automatically pre-processes commonly available global geospatial datasets and prepares them in a ready-to-run model set up package.
- It builds on the latest packages in the scientific and geospatial python language including xarray, rasterio, rioxarray, geopandas, scipy and pyflwdir.
- HydroMT is paired with a plugin which implements the model-builder for a specific model software. The publicly released model plugins are currently available for:
- Catchment hydrology: For the wflow distributed rainfall-runoff (wflow_sbm) and sediment transport (wflow_sediment) software.
- Water quality modelling: For the D-Water Quality and D-Emissions model software.
- 2D Flood Modelling: For the Super Fast 2D hydrodynamic model (SFINCS).
- Flood Impact Assessment: For the flood impact tool (FIAT).
How to obtain HydroMT
HydroMT is open source and free to use. It relies on third-party open-source datasets which a user must access and download themselves. Note that conditions of use for those datasets are set by the original data owners.
Deltares also offers service packages for HydroMT plugins. You can order a Service package via our Sales Service team (software@deltares.nl).
If HydroMT is free why should I get a service package? Good question, a service package holder will be able to contact us for support during Netherlands office hours for help. More importantly downloading, storing and maintaining large global datasets can be time consuming and costly, so model building services are included in the service packages. Thus removing that burden for organisations that may only build two or three models a year.
For technical questions about HydroMT please contact: hydromt@deltares.nl.