October 02, 2020

Basic tutorial of geological modeling with Python and Gempy

October 02, 2020/ Saul Montoya

Gempy 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.

September 30, 2020

A comprehensive list of specific Python packages for hydrogeology and groundwater modeling

September 30, 2020/ Saul Montoya

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.

September 22, 2020

Extract point value from a raster file with Python, Geopandas and Rasterio - Tutorial

September 22, 2020/ Saul Montoya

This tutorial has a complete case of spatial analysis for the extraction of point data from a raster dataset with Python and its libraries Geopandas and Rasterio. The procedure is entirely geospatial and uses shapefiles and tifs as input data; data calculation was performed on a Jupyter Lab environment.

September 21, 2020

Developing geospatial webapps with Python and Django - Tutorial

September 21, 2020/ Saul Montoya

There are many ways to display spatial data, from the traditional maps, GIS desktop software and most recently on the web. We face certain challenges to display spatial data on the web because we will require certain functionalities that we find on a desktop software and certain spatial analysis tools implemented as buttons. Django is a web framework written in Python that allows to create web applications with moderate simplicity and this framework is capable of displaying vector spatial data using libraries such as Folium.

We have created a tutorial with an applied case of displaying hydrological spatial information on a webapp in Django. The tutorial creates a Django project, creates an app for the spatial data representation, imports the vector data (geojson or shp) and displays spatial data with defined styles.

September 01, 2020

How much does a groundwater model cost? And how long does it take?

September 01, 2020/ Saul Montoya

Development of groundwater numerical models on a commercial scale has brought some issues regarding stakeholder participation, prediction quality and indelible price and time.

It might be that the question of how much a model can cost can be resolved as an equilibrium of how much are people willing to pay and how much the consultant is willing to receive. We will discuss some topics of this critical but not well explained topic in this article.

August 30, 2020

Modeling impermeable walls with MODFLOW 6 and HFB Package - Tutorial

August 30, 2020/ Saul Montoya

Modeling 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.

August 26, 2020

Hatarichem v2, the online tool to create Piper, Schoeller and Stiff Diagrams

August 26, 2020/ Saul Montoya

We present our own webapp for the representation of the Piper Diagram, Stiff Diagram and Scholler Diagram. The webapp was developed in Python Django and it is entirely free for everyone. The main objective behind this webapp was to develop a user friendly and minimum requirement tool to create these water quality / hidrogeochemical diagrams. The video tutorial shows the complete procedure to update the working file and then generate the diagrams.

August 24, 2020

Strategies for a hydrogeologist to develop advanced open source groundwater modeling software

August 24, 2020/ Saul Montoya

There 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.

August 18, 2020

Why is the "first great experience" so important to learn open software in water resources?

August 18, 2020/ Saul Montoya

Software is a technology tool, and through the history of mankind, tools are most recent technology have changed our cognitive skills and developed our intelligence. Water resources specialists deal with numerical simulations of surface flow, groundwater flow, interaction with the environment and prediction of future impacts with an extensive use of software and computers. In our point of view, there is a need of professionals that can deal with many types of software and programming codes to develop comprehensive evaluations of the current and future conditions of the water resources.

August 09, 2020

Tutorial to create a geospatial Voronoi-sh mesh with Python, Scipy and Geopandas

August 09, 2020/ Saul Montoya

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.

July 17, 2020

Basic example of hydrological modeling at basin scale with HEC HMS 4.5

July 17, 2020/ Saul Montoya

HEC HMS is a software developed by the US Corps of Engineers that implements a series of hydrological methods to represent different physical process of the water cycle. The tools and options of HEC HMS make it a very versatile and powerful software for the hydrological simulation of different escenarios as extreme events on arid regions, or water balances in wet climates.

This tutorial shows the complete procedure to set up and simulate the hydraulic response of a 8 hour storms over a 20 hour period, model results are intended to show maximum flows and flow development with time. The area of study is a andean basin that was divided on two sub-basins (high and low part), each one has their own storm precipitation data. The model consider the use of hydrological components as subbasin, reaches and sinks.

July 15, 2020

Tutorial to run a simple model of OpenFOAM with Parafoam in Windows 10

July 15, 2020/ Saul Montoya

The following tutorial shows the procedure to run an example model with the simple solver (steady-state for incompressible turbulent flow) from OpenFOAM in Windows 10. The tutorial covers also the steps to install Xming for the direct visualization of the model output with Paraview.

July 14, 2020

Are hydrogeologist - numerical modelers limited without programming?

July 14, 2020/ Saul Montoya

A great question came when we deal with numerical modeling in modern times or in the last 5 years, and that question is how much programming skills should a hydrogeologist - numerical modeler have? This question is above this one: Should a hydrogeologist - numerical modeler need to program in any language?

As a part of an socratic method attempt to answer this, we will split the question into some subquestions.

July 12, 2020

Tutorial of regional groundwater flow modeling with MODFLOW 6 and Model Muse 4

July 12, 2020/ Saul Montoya

Modeling groundwater flow on a regional scale has its own challenges because a regional model itself deals with refinement requirements, larger baselines, higher differences in elevations, complex geologies and areas without observation data.

The applied model of this tutorial covers the Angascancha Reservoir basin groundwater flow model in Ayacucho, Peru. This example have been modeled in several courses, tutorials and webinars with Modflow 2005, Flopy and Model Muse, however, this is the first time we port the model (succesfully) to Modflow 6 and Model Muse 4.

June 26, 2020

Tutorial to install OpenDroneMap (ODM) in Windows 10

June 26, 2020/ Saul Montoya

OpenDroneMap is such a great software for its capabilities to spatially process drone image and create a complete set of outputs as digital elevation model, point clouds, orthophotos and others. For regular users, the installation and the computational resources have allways been a challenge. This time we have develop a succesful procedure to install and run OpenDroneMap in Windows 10 by installing a Ubuntu 18.04 subsystem.

June 04, 2020

8 Tutorials of Contaminant Transport Modeling in Modflow and MT3DMS / MT3D

June 04, 2020/ Saul Montoya

Groundwater remediation is a challenge for stakeholders, scientists and population due to the limited baselines, high uncertainty, limited budgets and timeframes, and not so strong modeling capabilities of related professionals on a general scope (don’t take it personal). We might think about the success of groundwater remediation when we achieve a big group - more than a hundred per country - of geoscientists whit high skills on groundwater modeling distributed on the private sector, the regulatory sector and academia.

May 24, 2020

How to install OpenFOAM 7 directly on Window 10 - Tutorial

May 24, 2020/ Saul Montoya

OpenFoam is a great open source software for the numerical simulation of water, air, heat and any other physical fluid. Unfortunately OpenFOAM is Linux native and options to run it on Windows are limited with restrictions on tools, versions and available computational resources. With the latest developments on Windows 10 is is posible to install OpenFoam directly in Windows with something called a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and installing Ubuntu inside Windows.

This tutorial covers all the step required to install OpenFOAM in Windows 10 and its the base for coming modeling tutorials on OpenFOAM.

May 06, 2020

Download clipped satellite imagery from USGS AppEEARS tutorial - Case land cover images

May 06, 2020/ Saul Montoya

When working with satellite imagery we have to take into account the spatial and temporal scale. The selection and processing of remote sensing data products on a specific area over a certain period of time requires a great amount of time and computational resources. We have explored the web application AppEEARS from the USGS to download land cover images (MCD12Q1v006) over a specific area and time range. The tutorial covers all the steps from creating a polygon in QGIS3 as Geojson, upload into the webapp, the subsequent instructions to download the files, displaying the data in QGIS3 and review the pixel values correspondances.

May 01, 2020

Groundwater modeling tutorial in MODFLOW 6 with regional flow, lakes, rives and piezometers

May 01, 2020/ Saul Montoya

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.

April 28, 2020

How to install Modflow 6 on Model Muse 4 - Tutorial

April 28, 2020/ Saul Montoya

Great free and open groundwater flow modeling software are in constant development process, therefore year by year we have newer versions or even new software. This time we have uptated a basic and useful tutorial from 2016 to the new version of Modflow and Model Muse. The tutorial shows the complete procedure to download and install Model Muse 4 and configure Modflow 6.

May 9, 2024

Diploma in Groundwater Modeling with Python and FloPy - Asynchronous

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.

May 8, 2024

25% Off: Diploma in Applied Groundwater Modeling with MODFLOW and Model Muse - Asynchronous

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.

30% Off: Program in Hydrological Modeling with SWAT+ and QGIS - Asynchronous

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.

September 9, 2026

Benchmarking mf6Voronoi v0.0.38: Parallel Performance, Scaling Limits, and Mesh Refinement Dynamics

With the upcoming release of mf6Voronoi v0.0.38, optimizing mesh generation workflows remains a top priority. Constructing complex unstructured Voronoi grids for MODFLOW 6 can become computationally intensive as spatial resolution increases. To address this challenge, parallel execution capabilities were introduced into mf6Voronoi leveraging dask-geopandas.

August 20, 2026

Geopandas tools for the representation and analysis of water chemistry data - Tutorial

This tutorial explores a powerful interactive GeoPandas tool that facilitates the visual analysis and representation of water chemistry data. Through this Python workflow, you can display sampling points over satellite imagery and various basemaps, map concentrations using automatic color scales, and adjust marker sizes based on analyzed parameters. This direct integration allows you to customize the variables displayed on hover, streamlining data evaluation for baseline studies or water pollution diagnostics.

July 23, 2026

How to Interpolate Over 2 Million Points Quickly and Without Freezing - Tutorial

Interpolating large volumes of spatial data through the QGIS graphical interface is often a headache: the process takes too long or, even worse, the program freezes while consuming all system resources. In this tutorial, we will show you how to interpolate nearly 2 million points in less than two minutes using the OSGeo4W Shell and GDAL commands with the IDW method. By creating a virtual layer file (.vrt), you will learn a highly efficient, reliable, and lightweight workflow that enables you to work with millions of data points without being constrained by the limits of the GUI.

July 17, 2026

Plotting Water Surface Elevation from a 2D HEC-RAS Model using Python - Tutorial

This tutorial demonstrates how to accurately and efficiently extract the water surface elevation at a specific point from a HEC-RAS 2D unsteady flow model using Python in Jupyter Lab. Since water levels vary across the mesh and native software tools can limit automation, the author teaches how to open HDF5 output files (.hdf), load a point shapefile using GeoPandas, and apply a geospatial index K-d tree to locate the nearest computational cell. Finally, the time series data is processed to generate a water level hydrograph, which is essential for hydrogeological model calibration.

July 2, 2026

Advanced Crop Water Demand Modeling: Simulating ETo, ETc, and ETa with Python and pyfao56 - Tutorial

estimations of crop water requirements. This applied case offers a deep dive into modeling crop evapotranspiration using the standardized FAO-56 Dual Crop Coefficient methodology, implemented programmatically through Python.

Using a real-world case study of olive cultivation (Olea europaea) in the hyper-arid coastal desert of Bella Unión (Arequipa, Peru), we will demonstrate how to build an end-to-end hydrological data pipeline. Participants will learn how to integrate spatial data, process satellite-derived and weather station climate parameters, define soil-water-crop constraints, and simulate complex deficit drip-irrigation schedules.

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