HEC-RAS
The world's most used hydraulic model: free 1D/2D river analysis, sediment, water quality and flood mapping.
Benchmark-setting commercial 1D/2D flood engine with GPU acceleration — dominant in AU/UK flood studies.
by BMT
TUFLOW, from BMT, is the flood-modelling engine that consistently tops the UK Environment Agency 2D benchmarking exercises. Its HPC solver runs the full shallow-water equations on GPU with sub-grid sampling, quadtree meshes and best-in-class stability, coupled to ESTRY 1D networks for pipes and channels. TUFLOW dominates flood-risk practice in Australia and holds a large share of UK studies.
It is commercial and licensed per core/GPU, with model building typically done in QGIS (the free TUFLOW plugin) or SMS. For large urban and catchment-wide flood models where run time and stability matter, it is the engine to beat.
Other hydraulics & river systems tools covering similar workflow stages.
The world's most used hydraulic model: free 1D/2D river analysis, sediment, water quality and flood mapping.
FHWA's free culvert analysis program — the reference implementation of HDS-5 culvert hydraulics.
Open-source 2D shallow-water modelling in Python from Geoscience Australia — strong for dam break and tsunami.
ETH Zurich's free 2D hydraulics and morphodynamics simulator — rivers, sediment and hazard mapping.
GPU reimplementation of the CaMa-Flood global river routing model — continental flood simulation on PyTorch/Triton.
Deltares' open flexible-mesh suite for rivers, estuaries and coasts — hydrodynamics to morphology.