WBM Technical Manual
The manual is a highly navigable online text organized in a manner that allows the user to understand a variety of aspects of the Water Balance Model in varying degrees of detail. Funding for manual development was provided by Alberta Low Impact Development Partnership (ALIDP) and the Regional Adaptation Collaborative program. The latter is a federal/provincial initiative that is addressing the impacts posed by a changing climate.
To view the manual, click on http://waterbalance.ca/technical_manual/
A Highly Navigable Online Resource:
The Water Balance Model Technical Manual is structured to meet the information needs of technical audiences and provides technical descriptions of methods and formats used to gather inputs, transfer those inputs to the QUALHYMO modeling engine and display results within the Water Balance Model application.
The manual is a highly navigable online text organized in a manner that allows the user to understand a variety of aspects of the Water Balance Model in varying degrees of detail. The user can drill down into data variables, equations and other components of the system.
The Table of Contents on the left of the screen provides a listing of the major sections of the document. Hyperlinks throughout the document allow users to move to inter-related items of detail both within and outside the technical manual.
Date Mapping: ‘Follow the Numbers’:
The value of the Water Balance Model as a decision support tool resides in its ability to graph and report the differences between pre-development, post-development and mitigation scenarios for the modeled area.
In addition to the ability to model small (site), medium (development) and large (watershed) land masses, the simulation is performed with historically accurate climate data that spans a multi-decade period, recorded in hourly time steps.
The community of Water Balance Model users had been asking for a technical manual that documents the intelligent WBM interface that translates user information into data used by the QUALHYMO engine. The lens for manual development was the engineering user who wants to follow the numbers from the WBM interface keystroke to the QUALHYMO file. In a nutshell, it is all about data mapping.
Model Framework:
The figure below is a modeled image of a drainage area which displays the components that users define during the configuration of scenario. It serves as a framework to understand the relationship of the drainage area parameter details.
