Mini-Blogs for SWMM 5, InfoSWMM, InfoSewer and InfoWorks ICM

From the South Florida Watershed Journal

Fifteen gallons per minute
Alternative measurement units:

0.03 cubic feet per second
508 barrels per day (using 42.5 gallon barrels)
24 acre feet per year
7.9 million gallons per year
12 Olympic swimming pools per year

Weather Underground is a site that provides excellent local weather information in the form of graphs, tables and csv files. You can use the data very easily in SWMM 5 by copying from Excel to a time series in SWMM 5.


The data imported from the csv file to Excel and after the text to columns tool is used looks like this in Excel. The data is now ready to be imported into SWMM 5 after the time column is adjusted to fall on even 5 minute intervals. In Excel you can use the formula @ROUND((B2)/"0:05:00",0)*"0:05:00" to round all of the time values to 5 minutes. If you do not do this step then you will have problems in SWMM 5 due to the rainfall interval not being equal to the defined raingage interval.

Open up and make a new time series in SWMM 5 and then copy and paste the date, rounded time column and rainfall column into the SWMM 5 time series.

InfoSWMM and H2oMAP SWMM Release Notes
Sediment ModelingSCS Rainfall Distributions
InfoSWMM Version 1.0InfoSWMM Version 2.0InfoSWMM Version 3.0InfoSWMM Version 4.0InfoSWMM Version 5.0InfoSWMM Version 6.0InfoSWMM Version 7.0InfoSWMM Version 8.0InfoSWMM Version 8.5

The solution is iterative but each iteration is dependent on the CFL or explicit time step. The time step we select is based on the CFL condition but instead of just using the explicit solution we iterate until the node depths are converged or a maximum of 4 iterations is reached.
The solution of node depths and link flows in SWMM 5 is an iterative process but the number of iterations for the flows and links depends on how fast the node depth converges. The node continuity equation is ALWAYS solved at each iteration for each node but depending on whether both the link upstream and downstream node depths have converged the the number of iterations for a link may be between 2 and 4. The minimum number of iterations for a link is 2.