which is largely done manually, can be a
time-consuming and tedious process. A numerical model
that has enjoyed wide application in floodplain delineation
work during the past 35 years is the Hydrologic Engineering
Center’s HEC-2 model (USACE 1991). This model, which
contains the Fortran program “backwater any cross section”,
was the first simple, automated procedure that made water
surface profile computations a less time-consuming and tedious
exercise. In 1995 the Corps of Engineers released a
Windows version of this model, HEC-RAS, for river analysis
system (USACE 2001). Although this recent version offers
significant improvements over the earlier DOS-based
HEC-2 model, a major deficiency of both models remains
the fact that neither can transfer simulated water surface elevation
data directly to topographic maps of the regions in
question.