Benchmarks of GW-SW interaction: Assessing Integrated Hydrologic Models

Several Benchmarking Cases of GW-SW interaction using ParFlow and PFLOTRAN

Code Development Team

• Zheng Lu (legend.lz@mail.bnu.edu.cn)
• Xiaofan Yang (xfyang@bnu.edu.cn)

Citation

For more details on the Benchmarks of GW-SW interaction and if you use these cases in published work please cite the following reference:

   Kollet, S., Sulis, M., Maxwell, R.M., Paniconi, C., Putti, M., Bertoldi, G., Coon, E.T., Cordano, E., Endrizzi, S., Kikinzon, E., Mouche, E., Mügler, C., Park, Y., Refsgaard, J.C., Stisen, S. and Sudicky, E., 2017. The integrated hydrologic model intercomparison project, IH-MIP2: A second set of benchmark results to diagnose integrated hydrology and feedbacks. Water Resour. Res., 53(1): 867-890.

   Maxwell, R.M., Putti, M., Meyerhoff, S., Delfs, J., Ferguson, I.M., Ivanov, V., Kim, J., Kolditz, O., Kollet, S.J., Kumar, M., Lopez, S., Niu, J., Paniconi, C., Park, Y., Phanikumar, M.S., Shen, C., Sudicky, E.A. and Sulis, M., 2014. Surface-subsurface model intercomparison: A first set of benchmark results to diagnose integrated hydrology and feedbacks. Water Resour. Res., 50(2): 1531-1549.

   Sulis, M., Meyerhoff, S.B., Paniconi, C., Maxwell, R.M., Putti, M. and Kollet, S.J., 2010. A comparison of two physics-based numerical models for simulating surface water–groundwater interactions. Adv. Water Resour., 33(4): 456-467.

   Painter, S.L., Collier, N. and Jan, A., 2016. Integrated Surface/Subsurface Flow Modeling in PFLOTRAN.

Why benchmarking?

Groundwater-surface water interactions play a crucial role in hydrologic cycles. There is a growing interest in developing integrated hydrologic models to describe groundwater-surface water interactions and the associated processes. Integrated hydrologic models are often utilized for studying the interaction between surface flow and variably saturated groundwater flow, and quantitively describing hydrologic responses. A wide variety of such models have been developed using different numerical algorithms and methodologies based on physical processes, which, however, is rather complicated yet challenging to describe such processes associated with groundwater-surface water interactions in terms of mathematical representations, discretization strategies, and computational costs. It is then natural and essential to benchmark and validate models from simplified representations to beyond.

Installing the Integrated hydrologic models

The benchmark cases are provided using ParFlow and PFLOTRAN. To install them you will need to install the packages:

1. ParFlow

https://www.parflow.org/

2. The PETSc (Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation) libraries and PFLOTRAN

https://www.pflotran.org/

Getting started

Two overland flow-only benchmarking cases are involved and two integrated benchmarking cases are presented.

Workflow Scripts

Eight examples show the older with increasing complexity

1. surface_1D parking lot: overland flow hydrograph associated with uniform rainfall in a simple 1D test case
2. surface_2D v-catchment: overland flow generated by a rainfall event is then simulated on a simple tilted V-catchment
3. surface-subsurface_2D v-catchment infiltration excess: Coupled groundwater-surface water flow in a 2D infiltration excess test case (Hortonian flow)
4. surface-subsurface_2D v-catchment saturation excess: Coupled groundwater-surface water flow in a 2D saturation excess test case (Dunne flow)
5. surface-subsurface_2D v-catchment slab: Irregular Coupled groundwater-surface water flow in a 2D heterogeneous slab test case
6. surface-subsurface_2D v-catchment return flow: Coupled groundwater-surface water flow in a 2D return flow test case
7. surface-subsurface_2D sandbox: Coupled groundwater-surface water flow first performed by simulating a laboratory experiment conducted by Abdul and Gillham
8. 3d-hillslope

License

Copyright (C) 2022 Zheng Lu

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation version 3 of the License

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/

References

• Maxwell, R.R, et al. Parflow user's manual v3.10.
• Lichtner, P.C., et al. PFLOTRAN user manual v4.0.