Aquaveo & Water Resources Engineering News

It's been awhile since we posted any sprint reports, but that doesn't mean we've been enjoying a long vacation. GMS 10.3 is getting close to being done and the list of new features has been put on the wiki. There are a number of MODFLOW improvements, support for MT3D-USGS, major improvements to mod-PATH3DU (particle tracking for unstructured grids) and lots of other things including many user requests.

One user requested feature that will be in GMS 10.3 is the ability to add notes in various places in GMS. Notes can be added to objects like UGrids and coverages or to the project itself to help model developers remember where things came from or why they did things the way they did. GMS adds some notes automatically, like when an object is created from another object, like Map -> UGrid. All the notes can be shown, or just the user-created notes, or just the GMS-created notes. Here is an example of what it will look like.

Some of the more notable things completed by the GMS team during the month:

• Fixed several bugs.
• Finished PEST support for MODFLOW-USG
• Added a "2D" constraint to UGrids for use with TINs, 2D Meshes and 2D Scatter objects
• Added a "Fit to Active UGrid" command for grid frames.
• UGrid cutaway views progress
• Switched from Visual Studio 2010 to Visual Studio 2013
• Much refactoring

New in GMS 10.1 is support for the CLN (Connected Linear Network) Process of MODFLOW-USG. From the MODFLOW-USG documentation:

The CLN Process was developed for MODFLOW–USG to provide the framework for incorporating one-dimensional connected features into a structured or unstructured threedimensional GWF Process grid. A one-dimensional CLN feature is any hydrogeologic or hydrologic water conveyance feature that has a cross-sectional dimension which is much smaller than the longitudinal flow dimension and the size of the encompassing GWF cell. Flow is computed in the longitudinal direction of the network of connected one-dimensional features using specified cross-sectional properties; flow between CLN cells and GWF cells is computed across the wetted perimeter of the one-dimensional CLN feature. The CLN Process thus provides a mechanism for including features with small cross-sectional areas, relative to GWF cell sizes, without having to build this level of detail into the grid used for the GWF domain.

A new tutorial was created that introduces the CLN process interface in GMS, and a page was added to the wiki. CLN wells can be created a conceptual model, mapped to the grid, and edited on the grid.

GMS 10.1 adds the "Name File" dialog, which adds the following new capabilities:

• Unsupported packages (packages that don't have an interface in GMS) can be included in the solution and edited in a text editor
• Unsupported packages can be removed from the simulation
• Unit numbers are no longer altered by GMS
• Unit numbers can be set by the user

An example of the Name File dialog in use is shown below. In this example, a MODFLOW-CFP model was imported into GMS. Although GMS does not have an interface for the MODFLOW-CFP packages included in the model, those packages are still part of the simulation and are listed in the dialog. The input files for those packages can be edited from the dialog (using a text editor), or the packages can be removed from the simulation. But there is no need to remove the packages from the simulation because GMS 10.1 comes with a MODFLOW-CFP binary that can read the MODFLOW files that GMS writes. So this model can be run from GMS, and the solution, including the MODFLOW-CFP parts, can be displayed in GMS. This illustrates how GMS 10.1 includes better "support" for unsupported packages.