HDF5 output

Recent versions of HEC-RAS write results to HDF5, a binary data standard that users can access with free, public domain, viewers, and which is much easier to use and faster to access than the customized binary output used for previous sediment output. HDF5 files can be large, so HEC-RAS provides the option to write them or not. But they should be written for most sediment modeling applications. If they get too large, change the output increment. The current release version of HEC-RAS writes HDF5 files by default. The Sediment Output viewer access these data and will not work unless this feature is selected. If you open an HEC-RAS sediment model develop in a previous version and the Sediment Output does not work, you may need to turn this feature on to write the HDF5 output.

Modeling Note – Data Mining the HDF5 file: 

One of the advantages of moving to HDF5 output is that user can access the data directly with free, open source, editors (like HDFView) or can write code against these files to generate customized plots and isolate interesting results. See more about accessing these data externally in the section 

HEC-RAS generates two HDF5 files, storing the geometry data in one named (plan name).gxx.hdf and the results in a file named (plan name).pxx.hdf (where xx is the geometry or plan number). Sediment results are written to the *.pxx.hdf file in the Results→Sediment→Output Blocks→Base Output→Sediment Time Series folder (top). HEC-RAS writes time series for each cross section (or profiles for each time step) to the Cross Sections folder (middle-top) and updated cross sections for each requested time step to Cross section SE. Metadata, the profile names (time) and the cross section id's (space) that correspond to the rows and columns are stored in the Time entry under the Sediment Time Series (top) and the River Reach Station entry under Cross Section SE respectively. Cross section data are stored in Cross Section SE at each output cross section with two entries, a "value" entry with all the station-elevation for all cross sections at that time step stored sequentially and an "info" entry which stores the metadata to parse this string, reporting the first and last point in each cross section, named in the River Reach Station entry.