A loosely coupled GIS and hydrogeological modeling framework

Abstract

GIS technology gives a wide-ranging support to environmental modeling, especially to groundwater modeling. Numerous GIS applications have been developed to define the hydrogeological conceptual model as well as the numerical model. However, there is a scarcity of tools to implement the conceptual model in numerical modeling platforms. This transition needs of specific methodologies to adapt the geometries and alphanumerical data from the conceptual model to the numerical model to get optimal numerical results. Although most necessities can be satisfied with inherent GIS tools, there are particular steps in the implementation of hydrogeological conceptual model into the numerical modeling software that have not been automatized and put together yet. They are mostly related to finite element mesh generation. To overcome this gap, we present a set of tools, named ArcArAz, which focuses on the configuration of geometry and parameterization for groundwater numerical models, which can be used in other environmental sciences.