HEC-HMS: Past, Present, and the Road Ahead

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Q&A Report: HEC-HMS: Past, Present, and the Road Ahead (opens in new tab)

About

The Hydrologic Engineering Center's Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS) is one of the world's most widely used rainfall-runoff modelling platforms, supporting applications ranging from flood forecasting and water resources planning to dam safety and infrastructure design. This webinar explores the origins of HEC-HMS and traces its development from the DOS-based HEC-1 to the integrated modelling framework used today.

Building on this foundation, the webinar introduces the current capabilities of HEC-HMS and the diverse applications it is used for today. We’ll demonstrate advances in catchment delineation tools, precipitation and loss methods, transform and baseflow approaches, reservoir routing, calibration and uncertainty considerations, and the increasing integration of HEC-HMS with gridded datasets and discretisation.

Looking ahead, the webinar will consider the future direction of hydrologic modelling and the opportunities and challenges facing the HEC-HMS community with and substantial advances in hardware and software. Emerging topics will be discussed in an interactive, live, expert panel session, including the incorporation of higher-resolution datasets, advances in computational efficiency, ensemble and probabilistic approaches, and the influence of changing climate and land-use conditions

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Presenters

Michael Bartles

USACE

Mr. Bartles is a Hydraulic Engineer with ten years of experience specializing in Hydrologic and Hydraulic Modeling, Statistical Hydrology, and Software Development. Mike has been the project lead for... Read more

Thomas Brauer

USACE

Tom is a Water Resources Engineer specialising in Hydrologic Modelling and Software Development. As lead developer of HEC-HMS, Tom oversees all code activity undertaken by the HEC-HMS team. Tom archi... Read more

Michael Gerlach

West Consultants

Mike Gerlach is a civil engineer specialising in the hydrology of arid and semi-arid lands, hydraulic analysis and design, and dam safety studies. He is the primary author of drainage design manuals... Read more

Martin Jacobs

Consultant

Martin’s experience in hydrology covers more than three decades in civil engineering consultancy in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and UK. Martin’s projects cover a broad spectrum from single-l... Read more

Panel Members

Krey Price

International Water Training Institute

Educated at the University of California at Berkeley, Krey is a civil engineer and project manager with international experience in water resources. He is engaged in computational modelling, engineeri... Read more

HEC-HMS Masterclass

The HEC‑HMS Masterclass gives you a complete, practical pathway to modern rainfall–runoff modelling. Across eight focused sessions, you’ll learn how to structure catchments, select and calibrate methods, work with real datasets, and produce transparent, defensible results for planning, design, and flood studies. Designed for practitioners who want deeper capability, clearer workflows, and models they can stand behind.

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Sneak peek from the HEC‑HMS developers and get a first look at what’s coming next