Hydraulic models and supplementary data for 30 stream crossing sites in Massachusetts

The data in this Data Release are used to calibrate a Geographic Information System (GIS) based hydraulic modeling tool developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for Massachusetts in cooperation with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP). USGS developed one-dimensional U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Hydrologic Engineering Center’s River Analysis System (HEC-RAS) hydraulic models for 30 stream crossing sites in Massachusetts through the development and use of an automated GIS hydraulic modeling tool. These models are referred to as “GIS-based” hydraulic models. The USGS also field surveyed these same 30 sites and developed field-based HEC-RAS hydraulic models in order to calibrate the GIS-based models. These models are referred to as “Field-based” hydraulic models.  The hydraulic models generated preliminary designs for a 3-sided box, 3-sided arch, and a pipe culvert to convey the 10-, 4-, 2-, and 1-percent annual exceedance probability (AEP) flood flows and to meet the Massachusetts Stream Crossing Standards (SCS) at the 30 sites. These preliminary culvert designs, associated selected data, and the GIS-based HEC-RAS hydraulic model files are hosted on the U.S. Geological Survey StreamStats web application (https://streamstats.usgs.gov/ss/) for Massachusetts.

This data release contains site information and a location map for the 30 stream crossing sites. In addition, there are four components that contain preliminary culvert designs, hydrology and hydraulic data, and associated input survey or input geospatial data for the field- and GIS-based hydraulic models.

 The component named “Field-Based Hydraulic Model Survey Data” contains stream crossing field survey data used as input for the field-based hydraulic models.

The component named “Field-Based Hydraulic Models” contains HEC-RAS hydraulic model files developed from the field survey data.

The component named “GIS-Based Hydraulic Model Spatial Data Layers” contains the GIS generated geospatial data files for cross sections, stream centerlines, stream bank line, stream crossing location point data, and bankfull channel geometry data. In addition, this component contains flood flows used as input for the GIS-based and Field-based hydraulic models.

The component named “GIS-Based Hydraulic Models” contains HEC-RAS hydraulic model files developed from the geospatial data and README CSV files containing summarized information for each stream crossing site.