3D Groundwater modeling with PMWIN: A Simulation System for Modeling Groundwater Flow and Transport Processes 2nd edition

by Wen-Hsing Chiang

3D Groundwater modeling with PMWIN: This is a story about the birth, growth and life of Processing Modflow.

It was 1987 in Southern Germany when I encountered my first groundwater model as a member of a team headed by Wolfgang Kinzelbach at the University of Stuttgart.

The model was based on a two-dimensional finite element code FINEM[67] for simulating transient flow and transport with approximately 3500 nodes.

Although the team had access to supercomputers, it took a significantly long time to construct the model by drafting the model mesh over a map and by keying in the model data column-by-column and row-by-row.

3D Groundwater modeling with PMWIN: Back in those days we were lucky to have access to networked mainframe computers with monitors and keyboards instead of punch cards or paper tapes.

However, it was frustrating for me to see brilliant colleagues (including Thomas Franz, who co-authored Visual Modflow in 1995) sitting in front of a monitor typing number after number until midnight.

It happened so often that we nicknamed our IBM computers: Immer Bis Mitternacht, which means Always Till Midnight.

Bearing that experience in mind and with the encouragement of Wolfgang, I started coding my first graphical user interface FEMNET for support of data input and graphical result output for FINEM.