An education web site for free water engineering software

The provision of quality water engineering software for education is a growing challenge. Shrinking university budgets are affecting computer facilities while at the same time student numbers continue to grow. For this and other reasons, students are purchasing their own computers. In this changing environment, there is a growing need to supply students with software for personal use. To accommodate this need the Canine Software-canine has been established to allow students to freely download commercial standard water engineering software. This paper describes the Canine Software web site. Developers of water engineering software are invited to link their web site to the Canine site provided they meet the following conditions: I) The software is packaged with a modem graphical user interface and supplied free of charge with no restrictions on its capability (other than that its use be restricted to educational applications); 2) It has a comprehensive online help and tutorial system; 3) There is evidence of validation; and 4) There is a commitment to fix bugs on short notice. Two initial contributions to the Canine Software site are described. The first is WUFS, an urban stormwater drainage simulation model based on the established time-area method to simulate runoff from impervious and pervious contributing areas. WUFS allows the inclusion of many water-sensitive design features and provides full support for Australian Rainfall and Runoff design storms. The second is kinDog, an event-based rainfall-runoff model. kinDog is a distributed model which separately models hillslope runoff processes with conceptual nonlinear reservoir routing and channel flow using the kinematic wave approximation. Both programs provide online help using Internet Explorer and use a Windows-style graphical input/output centred around a network schematic.