River2D

Water Resources Engineering
University of Alberta


The River2D model, developed by the University of Alberta, is a two dimensional depth averaged hydrodynamic and fish habitat model for use in natural rivers and streams. It is a Finite Element model, based on a conservative Petrov-Galerkin upwinding formulation. It features subcritical-supercritical and wet-dry area solution capabilities. Ice covers with variable thickness and discontinuous ice covers can be modelled. It has been verified through a number of comparisons with theoretical, experimental and field results.

The River2D model, in the form of a Windows executable program, is available in the public domain. The program is supplied as is, with no warrant of completeness or applicability to any particular problem. The program and associated utilities, example data files, and documentation may be freely copied and distributed as long as this notice is included and use of the model is properly acknowledged.

The River2D model suite consists of four programs: R2D_Bed , R2D_Ice, R2D_Mesh and River2D. All four programs have graphical user interfaces that are supported by any 32 bit version of Windows. R2D_Bed, R2D_Ice, and R2D_Mesh are graphical file editors. R2D_Bed was designed for editing bed topography data while R2D_Ice is intended for developing ice topographies to be used in the modelling of ice-covered domains. The R2D_Mesh program is used for the development of computational meshes that will ultimately be input for River2D. See Description page for details of these utility programs.