What is SToRM?

SToRM (System for Transport and River Modeling) is an unsteady two-dimensional unstructured-grid flow solver developed by Francisco Simões of the U.S. Geological Survey. Because SToRM employs unstructured grids with local refinement in its coordinate system, it can provide suitable analysis even under the most complex boundary conditions. This makes the approach attractive for complex flooding problems where the user wants to explicitly treat buildings or other structure in the flow domain, rather that treating them as roughness or using other spatially-averaging techniques. SToRM also incorporates higher-order shock capturing schemes and accurate moving boundary methods, so this approach is the best one in iRIC for handling strong spatial and temporal variability such as that associated with flash floods, dam breaks or other “fast” problems.