In general, there are two situations in which you may want to compute incremental local inflows from total flows at a location:

  • In real-time operation where you want to compute the local inflow from observed data, then either use a recession equation to estimate the local inflow into the future or hand enter an estimate for the local inflow.
  • To compute incremental local flow data for a study model using observed or computed total flow data at key locations throughout the watershed.

Although each of these situations use the same OSI configuration they each may require a significantly different setup in the network and/or its alternative. To reflect this the next two sections present the generalized set of instructions for configuring a fairly simple model to compute local flow and some addition concepts and instructions for configuring a complex study model for computing local flow.