A special concern arises from the gap between the stage of development of open source groundwater software and the actual capabilities of the common groundwater modelers (we mean, the main group of modelers). Even though we are passionate about software we don’t find the time or the right momentum to have a real experience with those codes.

From our research, we have listed the top open source groundwater software with a brief summary of the capabilities and useful links. We have to mention that there are some packages that can simulate groundwater flow in software like OpenFoam; however, those variants are not listed here.

In 2017, the U.S. Geological Survey released a new core version of the MODFLOW program. This new version, called MODFLOW 6 (the sixth core version), extends the core MODFLOW capabilities to include robust solutions for complex water table problems, support for generalized meshes with focused resolution within areas of interest, and support for multiple models and multiple types of models within the same simulation. In addition to the Groundwater Flow Model, MODFLOW 6 now contains a Groundwater Transport Model, which can run simultaneously with the flow model or as a separate simulation using the results from a previous groundwater flow simulation.

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.