Description and Evaluation of Program: CARIMA

Abstract

This paper is one of a series resulting from the ASCE Task Committee on Irrigation Canal System Hydraulic Modeling, including presentation and evaluation of several programs, one of which is CARIMA. The CARIMA code simulates unsteady free‐surface flow in simple or multiply connected systems of rivers or canals. The simulation uses the Preissmann implicit finite difference method for solution of the complete de St. Venant equations and appropriate equations for hydraulic structures. Special features of the code include automatic topology recognition, a user interface for fully implicit incorporation of specialized supervisory and global control schemes, and the lack of any preset limits on network complexity or size of data tables. CARIMA was used to evaluate a canal automation algorithm at the California Polytechnic Model Canal facility. This investigation provided a useful comparison of CARIMA modeling results with actual results recorded on the Model Canal, and helped to set the specifications for the implementation of many of the computational techniques of CARIMA, in the CanalCAD modeling system.