Groundwater & Environmental Technology Blog

Join us for a free 1-hour webinar and learn about the new groundwater contaminant transport modeling capabilities in Visual MODFLOW Flex 2013.1. The webinar will be presented by Wayne Hesch (Product Champion for Visual MODFLOW Flex) and will comprise a brief presentation and live demonstration of contaminant transport modeling and various other new features and enhancements.

Schlumberger Water Services will be hosting an introductory groundwater modeling course in Mexico City on June 25-28, 2013. The course will be presented in spanish and will cover a range of topics including the basics of building a model, particle tracking, water balance analysis, contaminant transport modeling and model calibration. This four-day training course gives hydrogeologists and environmental professionals the opportunity to learn from a recognized expert in groundwater modeling.

Background

MODFLOW–USG is capable of simulating groundwater flow using a wide range of grid geometries. All of the grid information is characterized by the connectivity, connection lengths, connection flow areas, and cell areas and volumes. This information is provided to MODFLOW–USG in the unstructured discretization file (.DISU). For accurate flux calculations, the Control Volume Finite Difference (CVFD) method requires certain geometrical properties pertaining to the cell connections. For most grid types, this means that the line connecting the centers of two cells should bisect the shared edge at right angles. This condition is satisfied by equilateral triangles, rectangles, regular polygons, as shown below. (Panday et. al., 2013)

During the last week of March, Schlumberger Water Services hosted a free webinar on the new features in the Hydro GeoAnalyst 2013 release. The webinar comprises an overview and live demonstration of the the Event Planning Module, new printing options, improved query builder and more. If you missed the webinar, a full recording is available below.

Last week, Wayne Hesch, Senior Product Champion for Simulations, hosted a webinar with groundwater modelers from around the globe. The presentation outlined several new features currently in development for Visual MODFLOW Flex groundwater modeling software including MODFLOW-USG (UnStructured Grids), contaminant transport modeling with MT3DMS and cloud computing for PEST simulations. If you were unable to attend this webinar, the entire presentation can be viewed below.

Through a research initiative between Schlumberger Water Services and University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, a new methodology to model karst conduits was developed in a stochastic framework. The research work has concluded, and now we would like to hear from you on the relevance of applying this methodology to groundwater modeling codes.

Schlumberger will be offering a 1-day short course on the theory and fundamentals of MODFLOW-USG (MODFLOW with UnStructured Grids) before the start of the MODFLOW and More 2013 Conference. The course provides a combination of lectures and hands-on exercises that are based on real-world problems, and is intended for anyone that is familiar with MODFLOW family of codes. Visual MODFLOW Flex will be used to build the input files, run the MODFLOW-USG simulation, and analyze and interpret the results. The course will be taught by Sorab Panday, co-author of the MODFLOW-USG code, and Wayne Hesch, Product Manager for Visual MODFLOW.

Our partner, Oak Environmental Inc. is offering a one day Aquifer Testing short course ‘Critical Thinking in the Interpretation of Aquifer Test’ instructed by Christopher Neville of S.S. Papadopulos and Associates. This course will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on March 8th, 2013.

As you read this, tens of thousands of Diver dataloggers are currently in use worldwide, accurately and reliably monitoring water levels, temperature and conductivity. Under constant development since 1994, Divers continue to advance and perform within industry standards of accuracy, resolution and reliability. In fact, we are so confident in Diver quality and reliability that we give a 3 year warranty across the entire line – the only manufacturer of this type of instrument to do this.

2012 was a great year for Hydro GeoAnalyst! The stellar 2012 release made Hydro GeoAnalyst a must have product for environmental professionals. It includes the new electronic data delivery (EDD) import workflow for faster, more accurate data entry. Additionally, the online sharing options allow Hydro GeoAnalyst users to share project data easily with stakeholders. Hydro GeoAnalyst sales showed an 87% increase in new license purchases from the previous year.