PyRASFile

A set of Python scripts designed to automatically produce and process key input and output files for HEC-RAS. Since HEC-RAS can run many flow profiles in parallel, this allows users to run HEC-RAS on large volumes of data with minimal manual intervention.

See main.py for example usage (the developer's actual usage) of both writing profiles and reading reports.

Writing Profiles

The profileWriter script can be used to generate a flow profiles file (.fxx) with any number of profiles and reaches and any set of flow volumes for each point. The buildFile function contains the main functionality and will build the complete contents of a flow file.

General Notes

Minor manual intervention is currently required if the output file is not named to match an existing set of flow data, as HEC-RAS will not be able to find it. In order to fix this, edit the .prj project file and add an entry for the new flow file in with the other flow file entries.

buildFile Inputs Summary

buildFile requires the following inputs:

• nprofiles: the number of profiles to be generated
• profiledata: the data on flows for each profile; see below.
• bounddata: the data on boundary conditions; see below.
• title and ver: the title for the flow profile and the version of HEC-RAS in use.
• end: the data for the end of the file; this doesn't seem to require modification for steady flows, so this can typically be left as the default.

buildFile Input Details

profiledata

profileData needs to be in the form of a dictionary where the keys are a string specifying the river, reach, and station, and the values are a list of the flows for each profile. The key strings can be made using the helper function mkFlowHeader to ensure the correct format.

The number of flows for each entry in profiledata must be identical and equal to the number of profiles specified with nprofines.

bounddata

bounddata needs to be in the form of a dictionary where the keys are strings specifying the river and reach and the values are functions which will produce the appropriate boundary information given two arguments, the profile number and the flow rate (though these may often be ignored).

The keys should be in the format "river,reach".

The boundary data functions should return strings in the format used by mkBoundaryData, which accepts the arguments upname, dname, uparam, and dparam. upname and dname specify the type of boundary conditions, out of Known WS, Critical Depth, Normal Depth, and Junction. The two params need only be specified if the boundary conditions are Known WS, in which case they need to be a water depth appropriate to the flow rate, or Normal Depth, in which case they need to be a slope.

Reading Reports

After generating a HEC-RAS report, the parseFile function will parse the report file text to return a dictionary of values for all reaches and profiles. The convertCSV function will convert the report file into a CSV.