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.