Track: Water Resources
Rapid Model Development Tool for Regional Groundwater Flow Modeling Used for Wellhead Protection Efforts in Minnesota
Justin BlumBrian Johnson , Eric Strack
A vector-oriented groundwater flow model based on the Analytic Element Method, AEM (Strack, 1989), has been integrated with GIS by use of Esri MapObjects. This permits extremely rapid model development of regional groundwater flow systems. The Minnesota Department of Health is using this tool to delineate wellhead protection areas around public water supply wells. The Analytic Element Method is well suited to modeling sparse data (as is usually found in natural resource data sets) and is a worthy competitor to Visual MODFLOW. It is particularly well suited to modeling multilayered, leaky flow systems.
Justin Blum
Minnesota Department of Health
121 East 7th Place
St. Paul, MN 55101
USA
Telephone: 612/215-0797
Fax: 612/215-0978
E-mail: justin.blum@heath.state.mn.us