Design like LEGO. Simulate like a twin.
StormNET turns urban water infrastructure design into a live modeling process: place components, simulate response, visualize consequences, estimate cost, and refine decisions in real time. Performance and economics are evaluated together while the design is still flexible.
It sits between natural and built environments — rainfall, runoff, soils, terrain, pipes, channels, storage, controls, flooding, green infrastructure, and infrastructure economics become one interactive digital twin. This is especially powerful for large networked systems where alternatives multiply quickly.
Start with context. Refine the spatial fabric. Design with feedback.
StormNET uses the MAGNET data foundation as a starting context, but users can refine or replace terrain, imagery, land use, drainage, infrastructure, flood, and local datasets through DataNET. The result is an editable design system — not a fixed template — where hydrology, hydraulics, visualization, cost, and decision analysis evolve together. Sparse observations and field data are interpreted through dense terrain, land use, drainage, infrastructure, and cost-system data.
Modeling moves inside the design loop.
In StormNET, design is not followed by modeling — it is evaluated continuously. Hydrology, hydraulics, immersive visualization, and cost are computed together in real time as users build and refine infrastructure systems.
Design
Place infrastructure directly on a data-enabled landscape.
Simulate
Hydrologic and hydraulic behavior updates immediately.
Visualize
The system is rendered as an immersive digital twin in real time.
Evaluate cost
Cost implications update concurrently with design and simulation.
Iterate
Users refine design continuously with full system feedback.
Cities are where natural water meets built infrastructure.
Rainfall lands on roofs, roads, parking lots, parks, soils, and drainage corridors. It becomes runoff, infiltration, ponding, surcharge, storage, pollutant loading, flooding, or reuse — depending on how the city is designed.
Rainfall & runoff
Storm events, continuous rainfall, snowmelt, evaporation, interception, infiltration, and subcatchment runoff routing.
Drainage networks
Inlets, catch basins, manholes, closed conduits, open channels, outfalls, storage, and routing through the urban system.
Green infrastructure
Bioretention, rain gardens, permeable pavement, green roofs, rain barrels, infiltration trenches, and vegetative swales.
Digital twin context
Buildings, terrain, streets, LiDAR, DEMs, soils, land use, water levels, infrastructure, and water dynamics in 2D and 3D.
See StormNET bring urban water design into the live modeling loop.
The flipbook is where users see design become simulation: place infrastructure, visualize the digital twin, test hydrology and hydraulics, evaluate LIDs, inspect flood response, view budgets, and connect design choices to cost and decision consequences in real time.
Design and modeling are usually separated.
Traditional urban water workflows split the work into disconnected stages: conceptual layout, CAD design, model setup, simulation, result review, redesign, re-run, and reporting. Each loop costs time, breaks intuition, and makes rapid exploration difficult.
The StormNET flip
StormNET merges conceptual design, numerical modeling, simulation, visualization, water-budget analytics, cost estimation, and reporting into one interactive workflow. The model is not rebuilt after design — the design becomes the hydraulic model, the digital twin, and the cost model input.
Place infrastructure directly on the landscape.
Users draw and connect urban water components on a georeferenced background. Subcatchments, nodes, links, storage, LID controls, channels, and structures become a model system as they are created.
Explore the site
Use a virtual site visit with high-resolution terrain, LiDAR, soils, land use, streets, hydrology, and surrounding built context.
Draw the system
Place subcatchments, inlets, manholes, conduits, channels, ponds, culverts, pumps, weirs, or LID features like building with modular objects.
Convert to simulation
Geometry, elevations, slopes, lengths, widths, rainfall, infiltration, and many parameters are derived from data-enabled context and user design inputs.
Visualize and refine
Run the model, view water dynamics, flooding, profiles, cross-sections, time series, and 3D digital twin animations; then revise the design and repeat.
StormNET models the urban water system as connected objects.
StormNET is infrastructure-first. Users work with the objects engineers actually design and operate, while the platform handles the hydrology, hydraulics, visualization, and reporting around them.
Subcatchments and drainage
Urban surfaces, pervious and impervious areas, inlets, manholes, catch basins, storm drains, and overland runoff pathways.
Conduits, channels, rivers
Closed pipes, open channels, natural streams, irregular cross-sections, culverts, bridges, and floodplain routing.
Storage and controls
Ponds, tanks, wetlands, depressions, detention facilities, pumps, weirs, orifices, regulators, gates, and dynamic control rules.
LID and BMPs
Bioretention cells, permeable pavements, rain gardens, green roofs, infiltration trenches, rain barrels, vegetative swales, and rooftop disconnects.
Water quality
Pollutant buildup, washoff, rainfall deposition, street cleaning, BMP reduction, sanitary inflows, treatment, and routing through the drainage system.
Flood mapping
Flood inundation mapping, surface ponding, street flooding, bank lines, cross-sections, profiles, and 2D or 3D flood visualizations.
Everything important is tied to spatial data.
StormNET is live-linked to climate, terrain, land, soil, water, hydrology, infrastructure, and monitoring datasets. This data is not just background context — it becomes model geometry, parameters, forcing, and calibration evidence.
Conceptual model → numerical model → 3D water system.
StormNET converts model components into high-fidelity 3D CAD-style visualizations before simulation, during simulation, and after simulation. Users can inspect the built and natural environment, then animate water quantity dynamics through the system.
Every design object becomes a cost object.
StormNET closes the loop from conceptual design to budget. Pipes, manholes, ponds, culverts, LID controls, channels, pumps, storage units, and treatment features are not only visual and hydraulic objects — they carry dimensions, quantities, materials, regional prices, and lifecycle cost implications. Regional defaults are exposed through the interface, so users can tune unit costs, materials, labor assumptions, and local pricing as better bids or project-specific estimates become available. This moves cost from a late-stage estimate into an active design variable.
Conceptual model
Users place infrastructure on the map: subcatchments, pipes, channels, ponds, LIDs, pumps, controls, and storage.
3D CAD and simulation model
The same objects become a 3D digital twin and an EPA SWMM-based numerical model for hydrologic and hydraulic verification.
Water-budget and performance analytics
Runoff, storage, flooding, infiltration, LID performance, pollutant pathways, and routing behavior are analyzed in the same workflow.
Physics-based cost estimate
The cost model reads pipe diameter, trench depth, pond volume, LID layer thickness, storage curves, and pump curves directly from the model — then applies regional prices for 258 world regions.
29 cost components
Site drainage, grading, conveyance, nodes, storage, ponds, pumps, controls, green infrastructure, treatment, and associated site costs.
258 regional presets
Local labor, material, energy, and construction cost assumptions let the same engineering physics adapt to different economies — and can be overridden through the interface when better local data are available.
Layer-by-layer LID costs
Bioretention, rain gardens, permeable pavement, green roofs, infiltration trenches, swales, rain barrels, and rooftop disconnects are costed from actual SWMM layer parameters.
Interface-tunable assumptions
The cost interface helps users test scenarios, identify sensitive assumptions, collect better local data, and update the model for the next planning phase.
See how design choices reshape urban water pathways.
StormNET's process visualization reveals where water comes from, where it goes, which pathways dominate, how LID controls perform, and whether mass balance errors or numerical issues need attention.
infiltration · LID · storage · sewer routing · flooding · treatment
Interactive design, rigorous hydraulic simulation.
StormNET uses EPA SWMM-based hydrologic and hydraulic modeling to simulate event-based and continuous urban water response, including kinematic wave and full dynamic wave routing, pressurized and unpressurized flow, backwater, surcharging, reverse flow, surface ponding, street flooding, and floodplain inundation.
Hydrologic modeling
Precipitation, evaporation, snowmelt, interception, infiltration, runoff, groundwater inflow, and subcatchment water balance.
Hydraulic modeling
Conduits, open channels, rivers, storage routing, hydraulic structures, external inflows, controls, and unsteady flow dynamics.
Water quality modeling
Buildup, washoff, deposition, BMP effects, sanitary contributions, treatment, and pollutant routing through the model network.
Design, evaluate, optimize, and communicate.
StormNET supports the full cycle from concept to decision: initial site understanding, rapid infrastructure design, simulation, visual diagnosis, water-budget interpretation, cost-aware alternatives, lifecycle comparison, and presentation-quality reporting. Because networks create many possible combinations, StormNET helps users search the design space rather than settle for the first workable layout.
Design drainage systems
Size pipes, channels, inlets, detention ponds, storage units, culverts, bridges, and outlet structures for flood control and water quality protection.
Manage flooding and CSOs
Evaluate street flooding, floodplains, combined sewer overflows, sanitary inflow/infiltration, wet-weather loading, and emergency scenarios.
Test green-gray systems
Compare LID and BMP strategies, runoff reduction, pollutant load reduction, detention performance, and hybrid green-gray infrastructure.
Real-time cost makes urban water design teachable as engineering.
StormNET enables a teaching pattern that was previously difficult: students can design complete urban water systems, verify hydraulic performance, test green infrastructure, and compete on lifecycle cost while meeting explicit regulatory and resilience constraints.
From values to proof
Students do not just discuss sustainability; they build systems, simulate performance, quantify water balance, and prove that designs work.
Constraint-plus-cost design
Design teams meet requirements — no flooding, no downstream impact, reuse goals, self-cleansing velocities — at the lowest total lifecycle cost.
Fast iteration
Hydraulic feedback and cost feedback update together, making it practical to test many alternatives instead of a few disconnected design variants.
Combinatorial design space
Large networks create many feasible combinations of layout, sizing, storage, LID placement, and controls. Real-time feedback helps users explore that space intelligently.
From stormwater hazard to urban water resource.
StormNET extends beyond flood control and drainage. Urban runoff is not only a hazard to remove — it can be captured, stored, infiltrated, treated, reused, and integrated into broader urban systems.
Rain harvesting and reuse
Storage, detention, cisterns, rain barrels, and reuse strategies can be evaluated as hydraulic assets and as water-supply resources.
Distributed treatment
LID systems become decentralized storage, infiltration, and natural distributed treatment systems — reducing runoff while improving water quality.
Water–energy coupling
Pumping, energy use, operational cost, and solar-supported strategies can be evaluated alongside hydraulic performance and infrastructure cost.
Design the system, not just the drain.
Because hydrology, hydraulics, immersive visualization, and cost are evaluated together, users can assess not only system performance — but system value. Excess runoff becomes recoverable water; storage becomes a multi-purpose asset; green infrastructure becomes treatment and urban amenity; and infrastructure becomes part of a circular water system.
StormNET connects infrastructure design to the broader water system.
StormNET is the urban infrastructure branch of MAGNET4WATER. It complements SwaNET's watershed-scale hydrology, IGW-NET's groundwater dynamics, ConduitNET's pressurized distribution networks, and DataNET's spatial data fabric.
SwaNET → StormNET
Watershed hydrographs and basin-scale runoff context can inform downstream drainage, receiving water, river, and urban flooding analyses.
IGW-NET → StormNET
Groundwater levels can inform groundwater inflow, infiltration/inflow assumptions, stream interactions, and drainage-system boundary conditions.
ConduitNET ↔ StormNET
Pressurized distribution systems and unsteady urban hydraulic models can be evaluated as connected infrastructure where appropriate.
Urban water modeling that feels like building — and works like simulation.
StormNET brings real-time intelligence to urban water systems: modular design meets digital twin simulation, data fusion meets local context, water-budget insight meets engineering precision, cost-aware design meets urban resilience, and stormwater becomes part of a circular urban resource system.