Projects

Heron Consulting Projects

Our team has had the privilege of working with amazing clients to deliver projects that meet their needs. A few of these are highlighted below.

  • Developing a flood damage cost-benefit tool for municipalities to assess high-level mitigation options
  • Compiling geospatial data, building footprints, infrastructure costs at the Provincial scale
  • Enabling economic tradeoff assessments for structural and non-structural flood mitigation options
  • Software designed for provincial-scale flood damage estimation by municipal users
  • Delivering training and testing through multiple case studies across the Province
  •  Joint project with MacHydro Consultants for model upgrades
  • Deployed in the North Saskatchewan River Basin model
  • Added water demand optimization with linear programming, now available in Raven v4.0
  • New features: water licenses, environmental flow constraints, reservoir targets
  • Provided stakeholder tutorial on new capabilities
  • Upgrading flood forecasting and management models for new and existing flood control reservoirs
  • Enhancing model representation of reservoir operations and channel diversions in flood control
  • Integrating data assimilation for improved forecast accuracy
  • Ensuring compatibility with the City’s FEWS system and updating the FEW configuration

Heron Software Projects

Heron has several projects that Heron or Heron staff have developed, contributed to or help maintain. Many of these efforts are closely connected with academia and the University of Waterloo specifically. We have a tendency to support open-source and non-proprietary software where possible, and believe that this is the best for clients as well as for the state of practice.

  • Hydraulic software for rapid, regional-scale flood mapping
  • Combines geospatial analysis with 1D hydraulic models
  • Benchmarked against HEC-RAS 1D and HAND-Manning methods
  • Used in pilot projects for large-scale inundation mapping
  • Freely available software, may be used in forecasting workflows and scripting environments readily to support real-time inundation mapping
  • Raven is a flexible, robust and open-source hydrologic modelling framework
  • Used and supported by many agencies including Ontario Power Generation, City of Calgary, Alberta EPA, BC Hydro, TransAlta, Deltares, and many more
  • Heron has been retained to implement Raven upgrades, including:
    • Support for adaptor-free Deltares FEWS integration
    • Stream temperature simulation
    • Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) data assimilation
    • Integration of water resources management and optimization

Projects Supported by Heron Staff in Other Capacities

  • Ontario Lake and River Routing Product (OLRRP v2)
  • Canadian Lake and River Hydrofabric (CLRH)
  • RavenView – user interface for Raven
  • Ostrich – model calibration software