Acknowledgments

RAPID is Free, But Who Paid For It?

Cédric is the lead developer the RAPID code but would not have been able to lead the effort without the scientific and financial support of many including David R. Maidment, Florence Habets, Zong-Liang Yang and James S. Famiglietti. RAPID is made available through a Berkeley Software Distribution 3-clause license that is included in the source code and is therefore open-source.

Development History

The development of RAPID started in September 2007 as Cédric David joined the Center for Geosciences at Mines Paristech (Ecole des Mines de Paris, France) for a 6-month visit. This model was originally developed as an alternative to the river routing scheme of SIM-France, the operational hydro-meteorological model used by Meteo France (the French weather service). The visit at Mines-Paristech was done as part of Cédric's Ph. D. work at the Center for Research in Water Resources at the University of Texas at Austin; and the design, development and testing of RAPID were a large part of Cédric's Ph. D. dissertation which also included the adaptation of RAPID to run on the NHDPlus dataset that provides a "blue line" description of the river networks in the USA. Maintaining and enhancing RAPID were also a large part of Cédric's post-doctoral research at the Jackson School of Geosciences of the University of Texas at Austin and of his work at the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling. The current version of RAPID has been used with several land surface models and various river types of river networks.