Developing a hydrogeological research project that considers groundwater modeling for a bachelor thesis or a master thesis requires you to take into consideration several topics, such as input data, hydrogeological knowledge and time to learn the software in order to provide a numerical simulation that reaches the objectives of your research project.

Learning a software for groundwater modeling should be easy as developing some tutorials and playing around with your own data; however it is not that easy since it involves the review of lots of documentation, have strong knowledge in hydrogeology and numerical modeling and deal with uncertainties and numerical unconvergences.

Usually universities give six months to develop a thesis and that is not enough to develop a groundwater model when you don't have modeling capabilities at the beginning of the tesis. You might achieve this timeframe if you have intermediate knowledge on the software and half of the input data available from the beginning of the thesis period.

Our advice will be to have prior experience in modeling before your thesis and don't jump into the thesis with few modeling capabilities even though you take specific courses because time will always play against you.

How long does it take to develop a groundwater model from A to Z?

As a rule of thumb, it will take what you think about times pi (3.1416) and even more. There is no right answer to this but by sure a time frame of more than a year is required for developing a groundwater model if you don’t have any prior experience in modeling.

Things that might help you are review of software documentation, review of groundwater modeling or related papers and take speciallized courses.