Size a farm culvert, screen a rural drainage complaint, or check a drain petition — before you send a crew or commission a study.

Yes — for screening. Geo-Surface Pro sizes farm culverts from public LiDAR: it estimates peak flows at Q2, Q10, Q25, and Q100, sizes the barrel by FHWA HDS-5 inlet control at the headwater ratio and inlet type you set, and flags each crossing adequate, marginal, or undersized. It's screening-grade — a first-pass read to decide what's worth an engineer, not a stamped hydraulic design.

The short version: estimate the peak flow reaching the crossing, then size the barrel so the headwater stays within an allowable ratio. Geo-Surface Pro does both from public topo — peak flows by the Rational method (FHWA HEC-22) with NRCS TR-55 curve numbers, time of concentration by Kirpich, design rainfall from a built-in IDF database, and culvert sizing by FHWA HDS-5 inlet control. You get a defensible first-pass size to triage a complaint or a petition before commissioning engineered design.

Yes. Draw an area of interest, pull public LiDAR — USGS 3DEP in the US, HRDEM in Canada — and Geo-Surface lays flow paths over the real surface, maps ponding and depressions, and estimates the flows your crossings see. So you can screen ag drainage across a whole district on one flat membership. It reads the water and sizes the crossings; it does not produce a stamped drainage study or a delineated design surface — that's the engineer's step. You can also upload your own GeoTIFF if you have better data for a site.

Straight answer: it's built for farm drainage first. Watershed and drainage districts can use the same toolkit to screen rural drainage complaints, size farm culverts, and check drain-maintenance petitions on agricultural land. For that work, the LiDAR terrain, flow-path and ponding maps, and culvert screening earn their keep on one flat membership.

If your desk also handles urban storm systems, regulated floodplain studies, or structural hydraulics, those aren't what this tool is for — hand that work to your engineer. But for the farm-water questions that cross a rural board's desk, it does the job. And with the 30-day money-back guarantee, you can find out on your own ground with nothing at risk.

No — and we don't claim it does. Geo-Surface is the screening and visualization layer that comes first. Use it to read the water and size a culvert from public topo so you know whether a complaint, petition, or crossing is worth acting on. When it is, you commission the engineering study — and hand your engineer a screened starting point. When the answer is a maintenance note or "no action needed," you may not need a study at all.

Raw LiDAR reads a road embankment as a solid wall, so the terrain looks like it dams water behind every crossing. Culvert burn-in cuts the pipe through the surface, and Geo-Surface re-runs the flow and ponding analysis so water routes the way it actually will once it finds the culvert. You get a realistic before/after picture of the crossing — because roads aren't dams.

From a built-in IDF (intensity-duration-frequency) database — 686 rainfall stations from Environment Canada across Canada, with NOAA Atlas 14 entry for the United States. The peak-flow estimate uses real design storms for the site, so there's no separate rainfall lookup to chase down.

Yes, as a starting point — not as an engineered surface. There's no engineered surface-export pipeline, and we won't pretend otherwise. What exports is DXF for CAD layout and centerlines (plus shapefile and KML linework, and the culvert register as CSV), so the geometry and crossings you screened carry into your engineer's CAD workflow. The engineered surface and hydraulic design are built there.

Public LiDAR is excellent for screening and first-pass sizing — it tells you where water goes and whether a crossing is worth investigating. For the stamped, engineered design, conditions are confirmed with a field survey and the design is finished by your engineer. Screen from LiDAR; survey when the job goes ahead.

No. Geo-Surface runs in your browser and is built so a district administrator, technician, or public-works staffer can screen hydrology without setting up a CAD project. You draw an area, pull public elevation, and read the results — flows, culvert sizes, flow paths, and ponding.

No per-site or per-area charge — the membership is flat. One seat is $499/yr and screens unlimited sites, corridors, and complaints; screen one crossing or a hundred and the price doesn't move. For watershed districts, drainage boards, and conservation districts we offer multi-seat volume pricing with invoicing — reach out and we'll size it to your team.