In the semantic space the forbidden word is related to refuse to allow, and thus can create a controversy with the freedom of hydrogeologist / numerical modelers to choose whichever tool that can make the work done or the simulation run. However we as specialists in one part of the dynamics of the subsurface are conscious that solutions can not and must not be evaluated by single criteria.
Read MoreIn order to understand the relationship between groundwater flow and slope stability, a study area over a hotspot in the US. Landslide Inventory was selected. The geology, groundwater wells, elevation, and climate conditions were reviewed to develop a hydrogeological conceptual model that will be the basis for a numerical model of the groundwater flow regime. This webinar deals with the review of available spatial data related to the groundwater flow regime on a hillslope area at Mukilteo city, Washington, US. Information from geology, meteorology, observation data and boundary conditions will be discussed in a QGIS session with regards to the construction of a groundwater numerical model in MODFLOW.
Read MoreFor geologists, hydrogeologists, geostatistics, petroleum engineers, and other related professionals the choice for 3D geological modeling software was related to expensive and restrictive software that was in fact a “de facto” choice in several companies and institutions.
Although it is a choice of any company or professional to select the software anyone will use to model the geological units, a great gap subsides (using a geological term) on the use of this expensive software. If the software is expensive, how expensive will it be to get trained on this software? If few people have skills with certain software, how easy would it be to change to another software? How people can assess the quality of one software if they have no full capability on managing several softwares. As you have seen, restrictions on the licenses lead to these subsiding gaps, faults on quality, and an intrusion of professional ignorance.
Read MoreDeveloping 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.
Read MoreUntil now we had limited options to provide specific support in groundwater modeling. We know that modeling requires the review of extensive documentation and practical work with the software and sometimes or most times we don't have the time to sort things out.
Read MoreWe usually received some emails and messages regarding basic or reference books and publications in Hydrogeology and we didn't have any reference of free and high quality material until we knew about the Groundwater Project. It´s true that we found the project website some months ago, but it was at the latest IAH conference where we had a presentation with a complete overview of the program.
Read MoreThis is a problem that every hydrogeologist - numerical modeler has faced many times over his/her professional career independently from the theoretical background and skills with the code, graphical user interface or Python library.
We don’t know why groundwater “flows” and a contaminant plume “migrates” when both move on the aquifer system. After you construct you model geometry, setup the flow boundary condition, specify your transport package, define your contaminant sources, run your MODFLOW flow model and then run your MT3D model (or even your MT3DMS model) you will find that there is no plume, none, nada, nichts.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreGempy is an open-source library for modeling geology written in Python. The library is capable of creating complex 3D geological models including structures, fault networks, and unconformities and it can be coupled with uncertainty analysis.
Due to the required packages and specific configuration the installation of Gempy is a challenge on Windows, we have developed an alternative installation process by the use of a Debian kernel under a Windows Subsystem for Linux. This tutorial shows the complete procedure to install Gempy from the Debian kernel setup to the review of the Gempy in Python.
Read MoreTutorial for the calculation of the solubility and thermodynamic stability of gypsum and anhydrite. The example simulates the dissolution of two minerals in a beaker at equilibrium, and the beaker is heated step-wise from 25ºC to 75ºC. Concentrations and saturation indices for the initial solution and the batch reaction are shown as Pandas dataframes and plotted as bar diagrams on a Jupyter Notebook. Finally a plot of the saturation index for anhydrite and gypsum with temperature is generated from an iteration over the batch reaction steps.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThe speciation modeling allows to calculate the distribution of aqueous species in a solution. Phreeqc is capable to simulate this speciation calculation and we are going to demonstrate this capability on a study case of aqueous species in seawater.
We have done a tutorial for the speciation modeling of seawater with Phreeqc that runs under Python in a Jupyter Lab enviroment. The code can run the Phreeqc executable, define the databases and stablish the output files. Results from simulation are available as Pandas dataframes and plots are made for the main components and the distribution of saturation indices.
Read MoreThe topic of open source software and environmental assessments has some interesting associations. For example, if an investment project delivers a groundwater model in Xflow software, the environmental evaluator needs an Xflow license in order to open the model, review the simulations, and report on their observations. But what about civil society? or the communities that have an interest in knowing how the model is built or in the results of the predictive simulations, do these people also need an Xflow license? And what happens if another regulator wants to review the model, can they do so or they can only ask for a technical opinion?
Read MoreBecause 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.
Read MoreModflow6 is the latest version of the USGS code for groundwater modeling MODFLOW. This version has been coupled with another USGS open source software as Model Muse and Flopy and can implement diverse spatial discretization structures on a complete rearrangement of packages and keywords. We feel that there is a gap on the capabilities from a common groundwater modeler to adopt all the new development on Modflow and other open source groundwater software therefore we have prepared a video with the summary of this new release.
Read MoreGempy is an open-source library for modeling geology written in Python. The library is capable of creating complex 3D geological models including structures, fault networks, and unconformities and it can be coupled with uncertainty analysis.
We have created a tutorial of geological modeling based on geological contacts and surface orientations. The tutorial was developed in a Gempy container that runs under Docker in Windows 10; the tutorial covers the software installation and the geological modeling scripting.
Read MoreDevelopment 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.
Read MoreModeling the performance and effectiveness of flow barriers or impermeable walls on the groundwater flow regime is a challenge due to the wall geometry / orientation and discretization requirements. The package Horizontal Flow Barrier was designed to simulate barriers of defined thickness and conductances that are located in between flow cells, in this way the flow barrier is independent for the model discretization. This package is not new, it dates back to 1993, and it was implemented on many MODFLOW versions.
Read MoreThere are some shining moments in live where a normal hydrogeologist decide to develop open source software for groundwater modeling and for every great task everyone needs an strategy.
You might need a plan to develop your hydrogeological career but you will certainly need an strategy to develop groundwater modeling software. We have to see a strategy as the optimization of steps towards a goal, from great strategists as Hannibal Barca against the Roman empire, we need to see the whole picture and then decide the best steps to take with the resource available.
Read MoreDivide 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.
Read MoreHatarilabs presents its educational program designed for mastering Python in real professional and academic environments. The program has an extensive practical work that goes from the basic concepts of Python, Numpy and Pandas to specific applications in water resources and geosciences coupled with geospatial analysis and machine learning.
We have designed a complete program on MODFLOW with Model Muse that ranges from the essential topics in flow and transport modeling to applied cases of regional modeling, infrastructure projects, and seawater intrusion. MODFLOW with Model Muse is a recent open-source software that provides various tools for simulating the groundwater flow regime in different environments.
This program is designed to provide systematical learning from the most basic and general topics to intermediate and advanced topics, allowing the student to understand the various steps in developing hydrological models using the SWAT+ interface for QGIS. This program has a series of theoretical and practical concepts that allow the student to process spatial data, manage meteorological databases, build hydrological models, develop sensitivity analyses, and perform manual and automatic calibrations using versatile tools such as SWAT+ Toolbox, SQLite, and Python.
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Phreeqc is a software developed by the USGS written in C++ capable of modeling a variety of aqueous geochemical processes such as mixing of waters, modeling equilibrium between solid and aqueous phase, modeling impact of temperature, calculation of element concentration among others.
Hatarilabs has developed an applied and unique course of Phreeqc integrated with Python undes a class (object type) that can run, parse and provide Phreeqc output as Pandas dataframes and integrate it to plots and further analysis with other Python libraries on a Jupyter notebook.
HEC-RAS is a software designed to perform hydraulic 1D and 2D calculations on river channels either natural or man constructed. It allows steady flow, unsteady flow, sediment transport and water quality modelling. It is developed by the US army corps of engineers, US Department of defence and it is openly available software. The HEC-RAS steady flow is based on one dimensional energy equation, while for the unsteady flow, HEC-RAS uses an implicit, finite difference method to solve the fully dynamic Saint-Venant equations.
The objective of HEC-RAS is to solve river dynamics and river engineering problems. Applications are delimitation of flood areas, embankment and protection work design, river restoration, emergency plans for dam break, optimization of hydraulic work and risk assessment and management.
This course develops the main functions and applications of the latest version of the MODFLOW 6 groundwater modeling code through the ModelMuse interface, both developed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). This version includes innovative tools for the construction and simulation of hydrogeological models, mainly highlighting the incorporation of the discretization option for discretized by vertices grids.
The development of machine learning and geospatial libraries in Python as Scikit Image, Rasterio and Fiona gave us a new range of tools to analyze vegetation from traditional sources as satellite imagery and new sources as drone orthophotos. The appliance of Python programming for crop identification depends on many factors such as the image resolution, the vegetation stage and even the algorithm setup.
We have developed a course crop identification / delineation with geospatial and machine learning tools of Python, the course is aimed to GIS or related professionals that have basic Python knowledge. The course covers the introductory concepts of the geospatial libraries and a series of machine learning applications for crop indentification in olive trees, palms, agave and corn fields.
Note:
This course is for professionals with previous knowledge of Python. Basic concepts of Python programming will not be covered in the lessons and course material. In case you don’t have any knowledge of Python, we recommend you to take this online course.
The Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS) is a free program developed by the US Corps of Engineers that implements a series of hydrological methods to represent different physical processes of the water cycle.
HEC-HMS also includes procedures necessary for continuous simulation including evapotranspiration, infiltration, hydrological routing and soil moisture accounting. The tools and options of HEC HMS make it a very versatile and powerful software for the hydrological simulation of different scenarios such as extreme events in arid regions, or water balances in wet climates.
Hatarilabs offers the online course of Hydrological Modeling with HEC-HMS for students and professionals of any country. The course is focused on theory and practical to know the different HEC-HMS tools and its application to the hydrological modeling.
Hatarilabs offers the online course of Hydrological Modeling with QSWAT for students and professionals of any country. The course is focused on the acquisition and preprocessing of data for SWAT+ using QGIS 3.4 for develop hydrological watershed modeling.
This course covers the whole procedure of developing regional groundwater models through the ModelMuse interface, including the model construction, boundary conditions, parameter assignment, model simulation, results analysis and visualization, and model calibration. Flopy is also introduced in the course to import, create, refine and simulate the model as in ModelMuse. Two basins with different aquifer setting and boundary conditions are used as case studies to demonstrate the use of these tools so that the participants learn how to build these models and analyze the results for future decision-making.
Evaluation of long term impacts of the mining activity is a key topic on the public concern and regulatory and sustainability policies. Due to the scale of the mining projects and the different related activities, impacts could be made to several parts of the physical environment. Groundwater modeling is a useful tool for the simulation of mine closure impacts to the groundwater flow system and groundwater quality. Hatarilabs has developed an applied course about the simulation, calibration, representation and impact analysis of a waste dump closure on the environment and water bodies with a long term scope (closure and post closure). The course will be given on Model Muse for flow and contaminant transport modeling and scripts in Flopy for model calibration, water balance analysis and evaluation of remediation techniques performance.
This course is focused on how to use the different packages related to numerical tools, data analysis, representation of graphs, and others. Many of these tools are applicable to the field of Hydrology in the preparation of data for hydrological models, statistical analysis of hydrological parameters and model result representation.
Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are commonly used to construct and post-process numerical groundwater flow. Flopy is the Python library that builds and executes MODFLOW models; this library has tools and options for the complete geo-referencing of a MODFLOW model.
Python is a simple and powerful programming language; its simplicity is remarkable compared to other programming languages and its power is based on the number of tools available for different areas of study.
Use of Python with the available scientific packages and FloPy, facilitates data exploration, alternative model evaluations and model analyses that can be difficult to perform with GUIs. One advantage of Flopy and Python is that there are many packages available to facilitate the model development process, including packages for plotting, array manipulation, optimization, and data analysis.
This course allows acquired knowledge of the open source programming language to construct model input files, run the model, and read and plot simulation results.
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This tutorial demonstrates how to connect to a SensorThings API FROST server using Python to retrieve, inspect, and visualize IoT sensor datastreams. After setting up the server connection and querying datastream details such as units and observation counts, the notebook extracts time-series observations using paginated REST requests and loads them into a Pandas DataFrame. Following the data preparation phase, the script produces a series of continuous time-series line charts using Matplotlib and Seaborn, displaying the chronological trend of air temperature measurements recorded over time.
This tutorial demonstrates how to build and simulate a groundwater model focused on river-aquifer interactions using open-source software. The workflow begins in mf6Voronoi Studio, where a Voronoi grid mesh is generated to capture complex spatial geometries efficiently. The mesh is then imported into ModelMuse, where key aquifer properties and essential boundary conditions—including general head, river, well, recharge, and evapotranspiration—are configured. After running the model, the simulated results are evaluated through an analysis of the water balance and head distribution.
In this tutorial we introduce mf6Voronoi, a specialized tool for generating optimized Voronoi meshes for regional groundwater models capable of spanning thousand of square kilometers. The video demonstrates how to set up and run a Python script using Anaconda Prompt, leveraging Dask parallel processing to refine mesh resolution along key rivers and riparian ecosystems while maintaining a coarse discretization elsewhere. By utilizing multi-core computing, the workflow reduces total mesh generation time by approximately 40–45%, delivering a high-resolution, multi-scale MODFLOW 6 mesh consisting of over 150,000 cells in just a few minutes.
In this Hatarilabs tutorial, viewers learn how to access and query live environmental sensor data using Python and the OGC SensorThings API standard. The video walks through setting up a Jupyter Notebook environment to interact with a FROST-Server, explaining key SensorThings API concepts—including Things, Sensors, Observed Properties, and DataStreams. Using packages such as requests, pandas, and datetime, the session demonstrates how to apply API parameters like $top, $skip, $orderby, and $expand to efficiently filter and retrieve time-series observations, culminating in a data frame visualization of temperature readings from a live outdoor sensor.
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to build a regional groundwater flow model of an Andean basin using MF6Voronoi Studio and ModelMuse.
Generating flexible, non-rectangular meshes has historically been one of the most challenging steps in Modflow 6 modeling. MF6Voronoi Studio addresses this by providing a graphical interface for Python-based Voronoi mesh generation (DISV), allowing high-resolution cell refinement along river networks while maintaining a coarse mesh across the broader basin.
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FloPy is the Python library that builds and executes MODFLOW models; this library has been enhanced to provide full support of MODFLOW 6 with most of its recent development is related to functionality for MODFLOW 6, tools to use vector and raster spatial data and common plotting and export functionality.