Something that's not mentioned in the article is that the building they occupy is a former warehouse of Marinship, a World War Ⅱ shipyard that made Liberty Ships and T2 oil tankers used to supply fuel in the Pacific Theater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinship
The Bay Model building has a Marinship museum in a front room. For anyone who wants to see Marinship's full story in motion, here's my HEVC encode of ‘“Tanker” — 1942–1945 War Time History of Marinship Corporation’ https://mega dot nz/file/lgtmlKIA#asrzuwGOxi6l8I5BmgyAxfKkm1zFcxvY4SYS1SxqtZk
See also Marin City, which is the remains of Marinship's on-site worker housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_City,_California
e: the Bay Model building is the big square one that is center-frame starting at 04:30 in the video.
For science.
Simulation used to be essentially impossible, something one dreamed of, or had to pay for time on a Cray or similar supercomputer/cluster.
Apparently, the Chesapeake Bay model was built just as that was becoming feasible:
https://easternshorebrent.com/2017/11/30/doomed-progress-the...
and has since been dismantled and a business park built on the site.
Back in the 90's the Autodesk tech office was next door to the Bay Model and we'd occasionally pop over for lunch and tour the place.
Great to see it still around and open to the public.
Edit: above said "next door" so I'm curious how literal they meant this
So, It’s neat to see something competent! Imagine if they modeled what cutting off the natural draining to the Everglades would do :p
The existence of negative externalities or tradeoffs does not inherently imply incompetence.
I remember reading that the USACE said the NOLA levees would not adequately protect against a category 5 hurricane but the powers that be didn’t think the added cost for a more robust design was worth the risk. If true, it doesn’t imply USACE was incompetent but that we live in an uncertain world with tough tradeoffs.
More specifically, tidal flow obeys Froude similarity, not Reynolds. Matching the model's Froude number to the real Bay's requires enough depth for gravity waves and tides to scale correctly, which the vertical exaggeration provides.
But the distortion makes the flow too efficient, so copper strips are added throughout to achieve the right frictional resistance.
When building scaled models, adjustments have to be made to create that similitude, usually done by comparing some dimensionless number at the real scale and model scale. If you're using water, maybe you can't adjust the viscosity, so you may you have to adjust the velocity to get the same dimensionless number. Everything doesn't just scale linearly; you tweak the variables to achieve the dimensionless value so the whole system dynamics remain faithful.
E.g.,
(you can actually drink it if it's reasonably pure. it's even less toxic than ethanol, but the hangover is terrible)
In other countries the government would be involved but it would be a civilian rather than military role
- flood management is not easy to monetize so there is not much incentive for private industry. The timelines for design decisions (100 year, 500 year) often don’t mate well with private incentives
- it crosses many property boundaries which makes it hard to manage unless you have the rights of a government
- much of the work is still done by private companies but managed by the government, just like other infrastructure works like roads, bridges etc.
When I saw a demo, they had an easter egg of a Loch-Ness type monster in it.
There's also a topographical map of the harbour at St Ives showground but it's purely non-hydrographical. But it's almost disappeared now through neglect.
Meanwhile the Soviets probably found a little inlet somewhere that was "close enough", evicted anyone who lived there and excavated it to match.
Some junior engineer probably had to wake up at 1am to take a kayak out to "Little Kotlin Island" to change the tape in the recording equipment in time for the tide change.