Big fan of this thing. It's one of my favorite places to take friends who visit the Bay Area.

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, Marin City at 09:23, and some beginnings of modern-day international oil politics at 12:28.

If you don't know Tom Scott, he has done a great video 4mn vide on the model where you can see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw

The bay’s first LLM (large liquid model) was invented in the 1950s.

It's a shame that there isn't a series of articles on such models --- saw the Chesapeake Bay model (mentioned in a footnote) on a field trip when I was much younger (and it was still in active use for research I believe, yes, as my kids constantly tell me, I'm old).

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.

There's a similar model for the entire Great Lakes watershed at Discovery World in Milwaukee. You can even press a button to make it rain!

I highly recommend a visit. It’s only a beautiful ferry ride and nice walk along the waterfront away from San Francisco. A refreshingly retro and analog experience.

Their models HEC-HMS and HEC-RAS are really great hydraulic models. Unfortunately, with Windows native interfaces...

John McPhee talks about a similar model for the Mississippi River in “The Control of Nature” Well worth a read. Fun stories about Hawaii and Los Angeles too, iirc.

I haven't been there in awhile.

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.

This is neat to see. US army crops of engineers is a negative “word” to me after growing up in FL and they destroyed so many ecosystems. And the entire Everglades. They’re still at it now. My family has basically spent the past 30 years fighting a ware they put in on our natural creek. It killed the creek, it shrunk the flow to the size of the culvert.

So, It’s neat to see something competent! Imagine if they modeled what cutting off the natural draining to the Everglades would do :p