Simulating rainfall for better water catchment and usage

Hello all!

I've been developing a technique to create a 3d model of a landscape (using height maps or contour lines), and then simulating rainfall to see how water flows in the land.

This allows for an easy understand of wet/dry areas, key places for lakes, swales or other kind of interventions.

I've been thinking that I could develop this further and get it more precise and then do this for other people as a paid service.

Just wanted to get a quick feedback from Pemies, especially from people who have big lands, if this was something that you would consider useful.

My plan was to offer still shots of water flow, videos, and the top-down maps with the main water flow lines.

Do you think this might be worth the trouble, or people who care about water management can do it easily by themselves just by observation, pen and paper?

thanks in advance!

Nuno Donato : J.F. Sebastian has started a new thread in water catchment - - - - " water collections on this site '' Asking for help, our #1 rule here at permies
is problems are solutions !

A rising tide floats everyones Boats ! Thank you and good luck For the Crafts ! Big AL

Here's the link to the thread Allen mentioned - https://permies.com/t/40206/rainwater/Water-collection-locations-site

I think it would be a really useful piece of software to develop. Do you have any screen shots we could see? Or could you do a demo, maybe on the bit of land shown in the thread in the link?

Thanks! I posted there too

I'm not developing the software, I'm using a pre-existing 3d application, and tweaking a lot of stuff to be able to use it for these simulations.
When I get some more free time I'll try to get a real topographic map and do a real scenario

and here's a demo of a first test, for those not following the other thread:

Oh wow - that's starting to look interesting! I'm imagining all kinds of possibilities for that, like being able to draw a line between two points to create a 'dam' and watching the water build up behind.

I've embedded the video below.

Adding a swale

http://imgur.com/a/0oLxS

You're good at this, Nuno!

Nuno Donato : W.O.W. I am impressed, While I missed the clues as to the best place for the swale, just that simple demonstration taught me much about reading the land !

Thank you for that great 1st demonstration, I hope we can get others to send you more land maps with contour lines for you to begin our further Education. Truly this is a
step towards the betterment of the Crafts ! Big AL

BUMP ! Big AL

Keep up the good work! I stumbled across your project in r/permaculture, so I'll paste here the suggestions I made:

- A user-friendly way [for the user] to interact with the elevation model, to be able to place hypothetic swales and raise or lower the terrain at will.
- A kind of colored layer that records the amount of "drops" in an area right after the simulation has played, to be able to get a single quick image of the areas where water flows are more present.

David Vidal wrote:Keep up the good work! I stumbled across your project in r/permaculture, so I'll paste here the suggestions I made:

- A user-friendly way [for the user] to interact with the elevation model, to be able to place hypothetic swales and raise or lower the terrain at will.
- A kind of colored layer that records the amount of "drops" in an area right after the simulation has played, to be able to get a single quick image of the areas where water flows are more present.

hi!

well the 1st one is way out of my reach, I'm not developing the software, just adapting something pre-existing. I need to model the terrain by myself, and when doing swales or other interventions, i need to also do them in different ways.. no way I can automatize that :/

for the 2nd, yes, I have that planned already did one for this scenario, but I'm still tweaking values to get to more interesting looking results.

my point question now is if this would be worthwhile investing time in. It takes quite a lot of time to do it from scratch, simulate,etc.. which means the I would have to charge for those hours... and I dont know if there is enough people that much interested in water management and planning

Top-down view waterflow map, overlayed in the satellite image. Here it can be seen the swale effects on surface water coming from rainfall.

bump!