Aquaveo 2024 in Review

With 2024 coming to a close, we’ve done some great things. We’d like to share with you some of what we accomplished this past year.  

• As we promised, our developers finished GMS (Groundwater Modeling System) 10.8 and it was released in full at the beginning of this year. Besides the inclusion of the HydroGeoSphere model found in beta, our developers made updates to all the MODFLOW models. 

• MODFLOW 6 in GMS has some of the biggest updates including updates to Flow Budget, Velocity Vectors, and Starting Heads Equal to Top elevations. You can see more about these things in the “What’s New”[6] videos produced with the final release. 

• Our Watershed Modeling System (WMS) continues to advance with the release of 11.3. The GSSHA model now includes Permafrost modeling. It also includes two new Whitebox tools for Flow Directions in addition to TOPAZ and TauDEM.

• The  Toolbox continues to fill with more tools overall, but the Rasters and Coverage folders have greatly expanded. Among these are more Whitebox tools for rasters that can help with Watershed delineation.  

• Aquaveo is a proud sponsor of the new Tethys Geoscience Foundation, created this year in partnership with Lynker and Brigham Young University. The Foundation supports the Tethys Platform, a free and open source software suite that addresses the needs of environmental web apps, created by Aquaveo’s own Nathan Swain in 2017. 

• Aquaveo also continues to support GEOGLOWS, the initiative that combines industry, government, and academic efforts, in order to spearhead advancements in hydrological science across the globe that are dedicated to global water sustainability. 

• Aquaveo’s instructors have been busy this year with various virtual and in-person training sessions scattered throughout the calendar year and throughout the United States. National Highway Institute training proved to be the most popular, with custom-built classes for GMS being the next. 

• We are happy to have worked with FIRO, the Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations research program that investigates how it can improve water availability, enhance flood risk reduction, and achieve additional ecosystem benefits through the use of forecasted conditions in planning water management operations

• We said goodbye this year to Royd Nelson, Aquaveo’s founder, as he retired after 29 years of service. Royd has been a leader in computer modeling for hydrology and engineering since the beginning.  

Next year, we look forward to more advances. New versions of SMS and GMS are in the works. Keep watching us to see what is ahead. Looking forward to seeing you in 2025!