HydroMT - automated and reproducible model building and analysis
Build and analyse water system models with HydroMT: Deltares’ open-source Python package for reproducible, scalable geoscientific modelling. From climate adaptation to flood risk and water quality, HydroMT equips modellers to work efficiently with both global and local datasets - across platforms and projects.
The challenge
Modellers have always struggled with a lack of local data to build reliable spatial geoscientific models. While global datasets offer a potential solution, they can be difficult to access, integrate, and process efficiently. The complexities of combining local and global datasets pose additional hurdles—especially when working across different modelling platforms.
As a result, setting up water system models often becomes:
- Time-consuming
- Hard to reproduce
- Difficult to integrate with global datasets
- Complex to analyse across different models
To address these challenges, we must ensure our modelling tools are prepared for both current and future demands in water management—from climate adaptation to flood risk and water quality planning.
The Solution: HydroMT
HydroMT (Hydro Model Tools) is an open-source Python package that facilitates the process of building and analysing spatial geoscientific models with a focus on water system models. It does so by automating the workflow to go from raw data to a complete model instance which is ready to run and to analyse model results once the simulation has finished. As such it is an interface between user, data and models.
HydroMT empowers users with:
- Reproducible workflows for consistent results
- Modular and extendable to support various modelling software
- Global dataset compatibility
- Easy installation via PyPI and conda-forge
Model plugins
HydroMT is commonly used in combination with a model plugin which provides a HydroMT implementation for specific model software. Using the plugins allows to prepare a ready-to-run set of input files from raw geoscientific datasets and analyse model results in a fast and reproducible way. Known model plugins include:
- hydromt_wflow: A framework for distributed rainfall-runoff (wflow_sbm) and sediment transport (wflow_sediment) modelling.
- hydromt_delwaq: A framework for water quality (D-Water Quality) and emissions (D-Emissions) modelling.
- hydromt_sfincs: A fast 2D hydrodynamic flood model (SFINCS).
- hydromt_fiat: A flood impact model (FIAT).
- hydromt_delft3dfm: A flexible mesh hydrodynamic suite for 1D2D and 2D3D modelling (Delft3D FM).
How it works
HydroMT simplifies model setup in three steps:
- Prepare a data catalog file
- Configure your model setup
- Run the HydroMT build command
More details are available in the documentation.
Get involved
Found a bug or have a suggestion?
- Report issues on Github
