A mechanical lumped parameter model is proposed for the dynamic modeling of a semi-infinite reservoir. A semi-analytic transmitting boundary is derived for a semi-infinite 2-D reservoir of constant depth. The characteristics of the solution are examined in both frequency and time domains. Mass, damping and spring coefficients of the mechanical model are obtained to preserve the major features of the solution such as eigenfrequencies and the shapes of Bessel functions that appear as kernels in the convolution integrals. The lumped parameter model in its final form consists of two masses, a spring and two dampers for each eigenfrequency. Application examples demonstrated that the new lumped parameter model could be used for the time domain analysis of dam-reservoir systems.