Because field work and numerical models are just tools for the sustainable management of our groundwater resources we have searched a study place to develop a long-term project on a high-stressed aquifer that will lead to sustainable and effective groundwater policies. The study area is an alluvial aquifer that was primarily used for agriculture production with an neighboring unplanned urban development that has increased the domestic / industrial water demand. Several pumping schemas were implemented on the area and have affected the groundwater levels and the water availability for agriculture.

Development of open source software brings amazing new tools in all fields. In hydrogeology and groundwater modeling there is an increasing number of specific open source software and programming packages. We wanted to compile the latest libraries for Python related to hydrogeology, we asked for references and researched over the web to provide you the following list.

Divide a continuous media as a hydrological / hydrogeological basin into discrete parts is an art. Cell size have to related to hydrological features, cell number have to be optimized to cover areas of interest with an adequate refinement while minimizing the total cell number. The computational process has be fast to allow user run multiple times to achieve a desired mesh.

We have done a tutorial that creates a Voronoi-sh mesh over shapefiles with several options for refinement and polygon relaxation, resulting polygons are clipped to the mesh boundary and exported as shapefile or geojson. The script was done with Python, Scipy, and Geopandas.

We have developed an applied groundwater modeling case on the mesoscale that covers the most relevant physical process that affect the underground flow regime. Numerical simulation was constructed on Modflow 6 and Model Muse 4 on steady state conditions with variable hydraulic conductivity with depth to represent interbedded low conductivity layers. The tutorial cover all the steps of model and boundary condition setup, working with spatial data, analysis of water balance and review of water levels on piezometers.

Note: This is a base case for a coming webinar in sensibility analysis with MODFLOW 6, Python and the Flopy and Salib libraries. More information of this event will be posted on our social networks.

This tutorial has the complete process to insert piezometers as a HOB package into a regional groundwater flow in Modflow6. Original location, surface elevation and screen elevation are in csv format that was converted to shapefile in order to be imported by Model Muse 4. The tutorial also covers a Python script to represent the plot of calculated-observed heads with the NRMSE value as a header.

Groundwater can’t be seen (because its on the ground, obviously) and groundwater flow is extremely hard to understand unless we have a bigger scope of the theory and main features of the hydrogeological flow regime. One of the limitations for the understanding is the lack of interactive tools that provides user friendly environments for the representation of recharge zones, discharge zones, wells, wetlands, and other hydrogeological features.

We have developed a tutorial for the web representation of a MODFLOW model main features and head results in a combined process with the use of the Hataripy library, Paraview, Python and Steno3D.

Learning groundwater modeling is a challenge for the complexities of the codes, the lack or scarce piezometric and water quality data, the heterogeneity of the porous media and the few resources to explore complete and applied groundwater models with different boundary conditions and predictive scenarios.

Just few websites had uploaded complete groundwater flow models in MODFLOW and are accessible to the general public. We have to admit that most of the websites come from public institutions in the US. We hope that in a near future we can have more resources to get model reports and the complete MODFLOW model.

It might be that you are a talented groundwater modeler and very proficient with Python and Flopy that you start to realize that you don´t need to work in Windows anymore and want to migrate your favorite groundwater modeling code to other nice, soft, and warm Linux-based operating systems. Or, it might be the case that you want to configure and run MODFLOW models as a part of a webapp or in a web server. For the reasons mentioned before and other reasons that modern world could bring to us, a compiled version of MODFLOW in Linux is needed.

There isn’t as well a clear definition of applied hydrogeology, that following the literal meaning should be the hydrogeology in practice. We like the definition of applied hydrogeology as the real world hydrogeology, as the hydrogeology of non-homogeneous, non-infinite, non-isotropic and even non-porous media; applied hydrogeology is the hydrogeology that goes behind the book, far away from the “aquifer, aquitard, aquiclude” classification. Applied hydrogeology is the part of hydrogeology that solve problems, the science that tells us if the groundwater remediation will work, if a industrial complex will have water on the coming decade, or when the salinitization from the pumping well will overcome the reverse osmosis plant capacity.

Perception and interest on the groundwater resources are of high initial interest but long term low popularity, that is why normal and plain hydrogeologist need to promote an innovative perspective of the relation from human society with the groundwater resources as a strong part for every environmental protection plan and sustainable management policy elaboration.

This article has a list of aquifers around the globe, with special characteristics where a normal audience can see how water can exist below surface, how people have interacted with the aquifer