Open Source water engineering tools

Open-source 2D shallow-water modelling in Python from Geoscience Australia — strong for dam break and tsunami.

GPU reimplementation of the CaMa-Flood global river routing model — continental flood simulation on PyTorch/Triton.

The open global large-sample hydrology dataset — thousands of catchments with forcing, attributes and streamflow.

QGIS plugin for exploring mesh model results — animate TUFLOW, Telemac and HEC-RAS 2D outputs in the GIS.

Deltares' open flexible-mesh suite for rivers, estuaries and coasts — hydrodynamics to morphology.

USGS R package for long-term water-quality and streamflow trends — home of the WRTDS method.

Full MATLAB control of the EPANET engine — the standard bridge for control and optimisation research.

The Python interface to MODFLOW — build, run and post-process groundwater models entirely in code.

GRASS GIS

Open Source

Four decades of geospatial engineering — r.watershed and the most battle-tested hydrology modules in GIS.

Build and read EPA SWMM models as QGIS layers — free GIS-based SWMM model construction.

Jupyter notebook suite for batch HEC-RAS and HEC-HMS runs — parallel execution and calibration statistics.

A Python software stack for US hydrology data: NHD+ networks, gauges, DEMs, soils and climate via one API family.

Deltares' Python framework that builds ready-to-run hydrological models from global and local datasets.

The Bristol raster flood model behind global flood maps — open source with GPU-accelerated solvers.

Browser-based urban stormwater and drainage modeling powered by OpenSWMM 6 compiled to WebAssembly.

MATLAB (and Python/LabVIEW) co-simulation with SWMM — built for real-time control research.

Neyman-Scott stochastic rainfall generation in Python — synthetic series and disaggregation, single or multi-site.

Deep-learning rainfall-runoff modelling — the LSTM framework behind much of ML hydrology research.

An open-source take on Google Flood Hub — per-gauge neural network streamflow forecasting you can self-host.

Time-series analysis of groundwater heads in Python — transfer-function models instead of full aquifer simulation.

Python interface to the SWMM engine — step through simulations, read state, and control gates in real time.

Python water-resource network simulator — fast LP-based allocation for reservoir systems and supply networks.

QGIS

Open SourceVerified

The free, open-source GIS that has become the default spatial platform for water engineers worldwide.

A QGIS plugin that turns the free GIS into a water-network modelling environment for EPANET.

The QGIS interface for SWAT+ — delineate, discretise and build a watershed model without leaving the GIS.

Python automation for HEC-RAS 6.x: batch runs, parallel execution and HDF results extraction.

A modern Python interface for HEC-RAS project parsing, simulation automation, and result visualization.

Stochastic storm transposition in Python — probabilistic extreme rainfall scenarios from remote-sensing data.

A flexible hydrological modelling framework — emulate GR4J, HBV, HMETS or build your own model structure.

High-performance DEM conditioning — Priority-Flood depression filling at scale, C++ with Python bindings.

SAGA GIS

Open Source

The geomorphometry powerhouse — hundreds of terrain and hydrology modules behind a free desktop GIS.

Deltares' reduced-complexity compound flood model — coastal, fluvial and pluvial drivers in one fast solver.

The reference R implementation of SPEI and SPI from the index's own authors.

Python toolbox for calibrating and uncertainty-analysing any environmental model — SCE-UA, DREAM, GLUE and more.

The USDA watershed model for land use, sediment and nutrients — continuous simulation at catchment scale.

Dewberry's open tool for building STAC catalogs of storms and gauge data — inputs for stochastic storm transposition.

Open-source water hammer simulation in Python — method-of-characteristics transients on EPANET networks.

Utah State's parallel terrain-analysis suite — D-infinity flow modelling and objective stream-network extraction.

Analytic element groundwater modelling in Python — multi-layer steady flow with no grid at all.

The Variable Infiltration Capacity model — macroscale land-surface hydrology for big basins and climate studies.

Sandia/EPA's Python toolkit for water network resilience — EPANET simulation plus disaster scenarios and metrics.

Deltares' distributed hydrological model in Julia — gridded rainfall-runoff with kinematic-wave routing.

WhiteboxTools

Open SourceVerified

500+ fast geospatial analysis tools with the best DEM hydrology toolkit in open source.

INRAE's GR rainfall-runoff models (GR4J family) plus CemaNeige snow, packaged for R.

Reference Python implementations of SPI, SPEI and Palmer indices for drought monitoring.

The USGS R package for pulling NWIS and Water Quality Portal data — gauge records as tidy data frames.

Fast global watershed delineation in Python — the MERIT-Hydro engine behind the Global Watersheds web app.

Statistical downscaling and bias correction of climate projections in R — part of the climate4R framework.

Canadian government R package for streamflow analysis — trends, frequencies and summaries from HYDAT.

Python + Google Earth Engine without the pain — interactive mapping and analysis of petabyte-scale water data.

Python automation for HEC-HMS — batch and parallel runs, design storms, and DSS handoff to HEC-RAS.

R workhorse for hydrological time series — aggregation, summaries and hydrologically-aware plots in a few calls.

A tiny Python package that computes NSE, KGE and friends correctly — the metrics layer of model evaluation.

A friendly Python client for USGS NWIS streamflow data — request, cache and plot gauge records in a notebook.

EDF's open-source finite-element suite for free-surface flow — 2D/3D rivers, estuaries, waves and sediment.

Python framework for PEST/PEST++ workflows — programmatic setup, ensembles and uncertainty analysis.

Python control and post-processing for 2D hydraulic models — SRH-2D and HEC-RAS 2D results to VTK and beyond.

Reference and potential evapotranspiration in Python — 20+ published methods, FAO-56 included, on pandas/xarray.

Build RORB, WBNM and URBS model files straight from GIS shapefiles — with companion QGIS plugins.

Watershed delineation in pure Python — DEM conditioning to catchment boundary in a dozen lines.

Benchmark scenarios for smart-stormwater control — test real-time control algorithms on curated SWMM systems.

Read HEC-RAS HDF5 geometry and results into GeoPandas/xarray — built for FEMA's flood-risk data pipelines.

R client for the UK National River Flow Archive — catalogue, gauged daily flows and catchment metadata.

Pure-Python reading, editing and running of SWMM INP, RPT and OUT files — the full file-format toolkit.

Pandas-powered reading, editing and version-diffing of SWMM models — the model-management side of the stack.

Run and read EPA SWMM from R — model execution, results import and GIS conversion on CRAN.

Python CLI and library for extracting time series from SWMM binary output files.

The open library for weather-radar rainfall processing — from raw volumes to engineering-ready rainfall fields.

Climate indices and bias adjustment on xarray — the operational-grade library for climate-data engineering.