Best Practices for Mission Applications

An Automated Tool for Creating Bathymetric Elevation Area Capacity Tables

—John Peterson, US Army Corps of Engineers Alb District

Cochiti Reservoir was built as flood protection for the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico between the years of 1965 and 1975. At 5.5 miles long and filled with nearly 63 million cubic ft of material it is the world's eleventh largest earthen filled dam and retains a recreation pool of 1200 surface acre feet. Historically dam operations require the use of a calculated understanding of the volume of water being held behind the dam correlated to the elevation and surface area at the top of the pool. This relationship is summarized in what is called an Elevation Area Capacity table that is used for management of the dam. In this presentation we will demonstrate how the previously arduous process of producing this table has been automated using modern bathymetric data collection methods and volumetric post processing software that not only creates the table but facilitates real time visualization for simulations and bathymetric touring.