Many of us were hoping to see the official release of HEC-RAS version 5.0 around now (end of Feb, early March, 2015), but unfortunately there have been some delays due to a large amount of bug fixes and HEC won’t be releasing it as planned.  I haven’t been provided with a new date, and I don’t want to guess, but I don’t think it will be too much longer.  Keep checking back here at The RAS Solution, or at HEC’s website for the latest information on the official release.

The good news is this delay will give HEC some more time to include some more really cool and useful features.  Potential new features are shown below.

I don’t have all the details on these features yet, but the 2D Area Breaklines tool looks to be a quick and convenient way to align cell faces in your 2D mesh around terrain features-this will save a LOT of time setting up and editing your mesh.  The 2D Area Mann n Region will allow you to draw polygons directly in the HEC-RAS Geometry editor for region-specific n-value factors.  It won’t initially replace the need for a land-use shapefile, but will allow you to more easily run calibration on your n values.

In the meantime, the October Beta version of HEC-RAS 5.0 is still available and works very well. You can get the install file here or on the side bar of The RAS Solution.