Aquaveo & Water Resources Engineering News

We recently created the GMS Resources for Educators page at aquaveo.com. There you can find sample lectures, in-class exercises, and homework assignments for a one semester, college level course in groundwater modeling. The course teaches groundwater modeling principles with an emphasis on MODFLOW and MODPATH. GMS is used as one of the software tools in the course and a lot of time is spent building real models on the computer. From the course description, "This course is application oriented. We cover the fundamental equations and the modeling theory but the emphasis is on teaching you how to solve real world problems. At the end of the semester, you should feel confident in your ability to develop and calibrate a complex 3D groundwater model."

Dr. Norman L. Jones has taught this class for years at Brigham Young University as CE 547 - Groundwater Modeling. He continually updates and improves the material. To obtain the entire curriculum with a syllabus, tests, and answers to the homework assignments and the tests, email Dr. Jones njones@byu.edu.

At the end of the course students complete a case study of the Woburn site described in the book A Civil Action. If you are familiar with the book or the case, you might be interested in the excellent Woburn Hydrogeology Data page maintained by Dr. Jones which includes all sorts of raw data for use in building a groundwater model, as well as photos of the area and even photos of many of the key players in the book. The case study is designed to be done with the students divided up into small teams - some teams working for the prosecution, and some for the defense.

In GMS 8.0, the contour options were updated and improved. Most of the changes were behind the scenes in code that results in faster contouring which uses less memory and is more accurate. But the interface changed too. The old and new dialogs are shown below. The new dialog is cleaner and easier on the eyes. It also includes a new option - Block fill - for the Contour method. This option only applies to cell-centered grids and results in cells filled with a single color based on the value at the cell center. Block fill was previously only available for 3D grids as a separate display option and limited range and color ramp options. Now block fill is available for 2D and 3D grids and, because it's part of the Contour Options, the full suite of range and color ramp options are available.

Unfortunately by merging the block fill option in with the Contour Options we lost the ability to do both at the same time - that is block fill one data set and contour another data set. But the soon to be released GMS 8.1 restores the ability to do both at the same time.

Old Contour Options dialog.

New Contour Options dialog.

In order to help make it easier to learn how to use GMS, or to just see what GMS can do, we recently launched the GMS Learning Center at Aquaveo.com.  All the GMS videos we've created so far are available there. These are YouTube videos so you can also find them all on our Aquaveo channel on YouTube. Look for the GMS playlist. These videos are all recorded in high-def so they're best watched full screen at 720p. We add a few new videos each month. Various folks around the office have been recruited for the voice recordings and none of them are professional voice actors but we think they've done a pretty good job.

Also at the GMS Learning Center are all the standard tutorials which ship with GMS. The tutorials can be freely downloaded and completed offline. Finally there are links to the wiki, the user forums, the training courses, and a new Resources for Educators page that will probably warrant it's own blog post in the near future.

GMS 8 has an interface to the USGS SEAWAT model. SEAWAT is a combination of MODFLOW and MT3D that allows for the simulation of density dependent flow and transport. I have included an animation of one of the sample problems from the SEAWAT documentation. We also have created a tutorial that shows how to use the SEAWAT interface within GMS.