Dewberry, a privately held professional services firm, has been selected by California’s Merced Irrigation District (MID) to develop real-time hydrologic operations models using the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Hydrologic Engineering Center’s (HEC) Real-Time Simulation (RTS) software, a public version of the Corps Water Management System Control and Visualization Interface.

MID owns several hydroelectric dams and reservoirs that support approximately 138,000 acres of irrigable land. Once fully implemented, the HEC-RTS model will improve the district’s ability to predict short-term and seasonal reservoir inflows due to precipitation and snowmelt. Various reservoir operation alternatives will be simulated using these inflows, balancing the need for water conservation and flood control, while increasing resilience during wet and dry years. Dewberry will also develop a long-term planning model to support new and refined delivery strategies for the district.

Dewberry will use HEC-RTS to develop and integrate various models, including meteorological forecast data, hydrologic models (HEC-HMS), reservoir operation simulation models (HEC-ResSim), and hydraulic analysis (HEC-RAS).