Foam and leaf in Kanaka Creek. Not all of my fieldwork was strictly technical. Sometimes I just took photos because I saw something interesting.

HEC-RAS 4 again

Well, we finished the streamflow part of the HEC-RAS 4 course and have started on the sediment transport portion. The good news: HEC-RAS 4 does the Wilcock bedload rating curve. The bad news - it is a crappy one-dimensional solution that produces results for a mixture that are the opposite of what Curran and Wilcock report in real life. Hmmmm.

After taking this course I think that I will be using it (HR4) to determine bankfull reach profiles and NOT using it for sediment transport calculations. Maybe for a backup incipient motion threshold calculation as a check, though. It might do that well enough...

HEC-RAS

I am struggling with HEC-RAS 4.0 beta. It does not seem intuitive to me. I downloaded it and played with it and realized there are thousands of ways to make it crash or get bad results.

Fortunately there is a course in Portland next Monday through Friday on HEC-RAS put on by River Restoration NW. You can bet I'll be there!