USGS Has Been Busy

The USGS has released numerous versions of MODFLOW recently. The most recent is an update for MODFLOW2005 (version 1.05.00). The updated the model to the same version as in GSFLOW (described later) and fixed some minor bugs. Most important to me is they added back the DDREFERENCE flag in output control that they removed when going from MODFLOW2000 to MODFLOW2005. That undocumented flag is very nice because it allows drawdown to be computed from the results of any particular time step. If you use Groundwater Vistas, you can access this flag through the new custom output control.

SEAWAT Version 4 was released last month. The major new feature is the ability to simulate heat transport.

The Conduit Flow Process (CFP) was released recently. It allows for the simulation of karst features (conduits) in MODFLOW2005.

GSFLOW is a new surface water/groundwater model. The groundwater part is MODFLOW2005 and the surface water is PRMS (Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System).

None of these new versions are in Groundwater Vistas yet. The new MODFLOW2005 and SEAWAT will be added first, followed by CFP, and finally GSFLOW. The latter will take quite a while to implement.