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Welcome to the RAPID Hub!
The RAPID Hub is the go-to place for information about the Routing
Application for Parallel computatIon of Discharge (RAPID). Enjoy!
Description
The Routing Application for Parallel computatIon of Discharge
(RAPID) is a river routing model. Given surface and groundwater
inflow to rivers, this model can compute the flow and volume of
water everywhere in river networks made out of many thousands of
reaches. The design of RAPID allows it to be adapted to any river
network, if given basic connectivity information. RAPID uses a
matrix version of the Muskingum method, and has an automated
parameter estimation procedure that allows finding optimal model
parameters based on available gage measurements. This model uses
the Fortran programming language and can be run on personal
computers, as well as on massively-parallel supercomputers, with
demonstrated fixed-size parallel speedup. RAPID has the ability to
run and/or optimize model parameters on any subbasin included in
its computing domain. If major man-made infrastructures are present
on the river network, RAPID allows to easily substitute upstream
flow measured by gages within its simulations of river flow and its
optimization of parameters. If information concerning water
withdrawals or return flows is available, RAPID can remove or add
the corresponding flows from its computations as well. Detailed
information on RAPID can be found in the related
publications.
Development history
The development of RAPID started in September 2007 as Cédric
David joined the Center for Geosciences at Mines Paristech (Ecole
des Mines de Paris, France) for a 6-month visit. This model was
originally developed as an alternative to the river routing scheme
of SIM-France, the operational hydro-meteorological model used by
Meteo France (the French weather service). The visit at
Mines-Paristech was done as part of Cédric's Ph. D. work at
the Center for Research in Water Resources at the University of
Texas at Austin; and the design, development and testing of RAPID
were a large part of Cédric's Ph. D. dissertation which also
included the adaptation of RAPID to run on the NHDPlus dataset that
provides a "blue line" description of the river networks
in the USA. Maintaining and enhancing RAPID were also a large part
of Cédric's post-doctoral research at the Jackson School of
Geosciences of the University of Texas at Austin and of his work at
the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling.
The current version of RAPID has been used with several land
surface models and various river types of river networks.
RAPID is free, but who paid for it?
Cédric is the lead developer the RAPID code but would not
have been able to lead the effort without the scientific and
financial support of many including David R. Maidment, Florence
Habets, Zong-Liang Yang and James S. Famiglietti. RAPID is made
available through a Berkeley Software Distribution 3-clause license
that is included in the source code and is therefore open-source.
For more information on the funding and scientific support behind
RAPID, please consult
who paid for RAPID?.