HydroGeoSphere - Tightly Coupled Groundwater & Surface Water Simulations

Why use HydroGeoSphere?

It is well understood that groundwater and surface water flow as part of a single integrated system, and with the rapid acceleration of computational power in recent years, and the development of advanced simulation engines like HydroGeoSphere, it is now possible to model the full terrestrial portion of the hydrologic cycle.

HGS is the world’s most powerful integrated hydrologic modeling platform. HGS is a three-dimensional control-volume finite element simulator designed with an entirely physics-based approach to modeling groundwater/surface water hydrology. HGS uses a globally-implicit approach to simultaneously solve the 2D diffusive-wave equation for overland/surface water flow and the 3D form of Richards’ equation for variably saturated groundwater flow.

The HGS Interface for GMS currently supports the 2D surface flow, 3D variably saturated groundwater flow and evapotranspiration modelling capabilities of HydroGeoSphere, giving users all the processes they need to model water resources at the watershed scale. Additional feature support will be included in future releases of the HGS Interface for GMS

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HydroGeoSphere (HGS) Description

HGS dynamically integrates key components of the hydrologic cycles and can incorporate land surface processes such as evaporation from bare soil, transpiration with evolving vegetation, unsaturated flow, flow in porous and/or discrete fractured media, and reactive solute and thermal energy transport within the overall hydrogeosphere. Macro pores, fractures, and tile drains can be incorporated discretely or using a dual-porosity, dual permeability formulation. The model can also simulate winter hydrological processes such as snow accumulation/melting and pore-water freezing/thawing.

The HydroGeoSphere platform has been parallelized to utilize high performance computing facilities and to address challenging scientific and engineering problems such as the analysis of climate change impacts on water resources at the watershed, basin, and continental scales.

Note: the HGS Interface for GMS supports the most integral features/capabilities of the HGS modeling engine including 2D surface water flow, 3D variably saturated groundwater flow, and evapotranspiration. A full suite of boundary conditions and parameterization tools are available to support these basic flow capabilities. The feature set listed below (e.g. solute transport) is not representative of the features available through the HGS interface for GMS. Additional HGS capabilities may be implemented using the native HGS workflow (contact GMS sales/support for more information). For example, a flow model produced using the HGS interface for GMS may be modified using the native HGS workflow to incorporate solute transport, density dependent flow, fracture flow, etc. Future versions of the HGS Interface may expand on the HGS features/capabilities supported by GMS.

HydroGeoSphere Key Features/Capabilities