About Hydrata
Hydraulic model verification, built by engineers for engineers.
The Company
Hydrata is an Australian company (NSW, Australia) that builds and operates a hydraulic-model verification platform for consulting engineers, local authorities, dam owners, and researchers.
The platform is built on GeoNode and runs the ANUGA two-dimensional hydrodynamic solver developed by Geoscience Australia and the Australian National University. The hydraulic model codebase is open source and every result is auditable: every input, run, and reviewer comment is recorded and traceable to the data that produced it.
Hydrata is not the engineer-of-record for any model verified on the platform. The client's engineer remains responsible for the design. Hydrata identifies issues and documents the verification process.
Founder
David Kennewell
CPEng (Engineers Australia, NPER NSW) | Founder
David has 25 years of water resources engineering experience across government, engineering consultancy, and industry. He has delivered engineering designs from project feasibility through all phases of design, construction, and operational management, including environmental impact assessments and mitigation design.
He founded Hydrata after seeing how the lack of a structured verification workflow caused flood models to be sent back by reviewers for documentation and methodology gaps, not engineering errors. The platform enforces unskippable checklists and ties every reviewer comment to the geospatial context of the model.
Hydrata is based in Sydney, Australia, with an additional office in Dubai, UAE.
The Solver Heritage
Hydrata runs unmodified ANUGA, the open-source 2D shallow water equation solver developed by Geoscience Australia and the Australian National University. ANUGA has been validated against 30+ benchmarks and is the subject of 100+ peer-reviewed publications.
Government-agency-grade institutional backing: Geoscience Australia (Department of Industry, Science and Resources) and ANU Mathematical Sciences Institute.
Open Source and Deterministic Results
The Hydrata run engine is open source and publicly auditable. The code that runs your model on the Hydrata platform is the same code you would run locally, with no proprietary modifications or black-box processing.
github.com/Hydrata/run_anuga (the canonical Hydrata ANUGA run engine)
Identical results to running ANUGA locally
Hydrata's cloud runs produce bit-for-bit identical results to a local ANUGA run with the same inputs. This is a consequence of the deterministic nature of the ANUGA solver: given identical inputs and solver version, the numerical output is deterministic.
What this means in practice:
- A reviewer can reproduce any Hydrata result by downloading the run inputs and running the same ANUGA version locally.
- Running the same model twice on Hydrata produces the same numerical outputs (same DEM, boundary conditions, friction, mesh).
- No hidden parameters or platform-specific solver modifications affect the result.
- The run_anuga GitHub repository pins the exact ANUGA version used for each run, so reproducibility is traceable to a specific solver commit.
This determinism is what makes the Hydrata verification meaningful: the verification report is not a certification of the platform but of the model inputs and methodology. Any independent engineer can verify the same result.
Get in Touch
Questions about the platform or a verification engagement?