SMS (Surface-water Modeling System) is a proprietary software application developed by Aquaveo for building and simulating surface water models. It provides a graphical user interface and analysis environment that allows engineers and scientists to visualize, manipulate, analyze, and understand numerical data and associated measurements in a three-dimensional environment.
Overview
SMS features both 1D and 2D modeling capabilities and employs a conceptual model approach. It supports a wide range of numerical models, including ADCIRC, CMS-FLOW2D, FESWMS, TABS, TUFLOW, BOUSS-2D, CGWAVE, STWAVE, CMS-WAVE (WABED), GENESIS, PTM, and WAM. Version 9.2 introduced the use of XMDF (eXtensible Model Data Format), a compatible extension of HDF5, which produces smaller files with faster access times compared to ASCII formats.
History
SMS was initially developed in the late 1980s by the Engineering Computer Graphics Laboratory at Brigham Young University (renamed in September 1998 to the Environmental Modeling Research Laboratory, or EMRL). Development was funded primarily by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and the software is still known as the Department of Defense Surface-water Modeling System (DoD SMS). It was originally built for Unix workstations and was later ported to Windows platforms in the mid-1990s, with support for HP-UX, IRIX, OSF/1, and Solaris subsequently discontinued.
In April 2007, the main software development team at EMRL entered private enterprise as Aquaveo LLC, which continues to develop SMS alongside related products such as WMS (Watershed Modeling System) and GMS (Groundwater Modeling System).
Technical details
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Developer | Aquaveo |
| Stable release | 13.3 (September 2023) |
| Operating system | Windows |
| Type | Surface water modeling software |
| License | Proprietary |
Applications
SMS has been used in a variety of hydrological and hydraulic engineering contexts, including:
- Determining flooded areas in the event of weir failure combined with 100-year flood events (e.g., studies on the Bavarian portion of the River Main).
- Modeling pollutant dispersion in river systems (e.g., a case study on the River Prut in Ungheni, Moldova).
- Simulating water quality and hydrodynamics in reservoir and river confluence zones (e.g., the Chusovskoy water intake on the Kamskaya reservoir in Russia).
- Coastal modeling through the Coastal Modeling System (CMS) operated within the SMS interface.
Related software
SMS is part of a suite of water modeling tools from Aquaveo, which also includes:
- WMS (Watershed Modeling System) — for watershed computer simulations, supporting models such as HEC-1, HEC-RAS, HEC-HMS, TR-20, TR-55, HSPF, GSSHA, and others.
- GMS (Groundwater Modeling System) — for groundwater modeling.
