HydroGeoSphere: A Fully Integrated, Physically Based Hydrological Model

Introduction The importance of a quantitative understanding of the hydrological cycle increases with the ever-growing demand for water for anthropogenic needs. Numerical models are inevitable tools in this undertaking. A wide range of numerical models of different complexity have been developed for this purpose, ranging from simple, lumped parameter models to more complex, physically based models. The foundation of physically based models is the blueprint paper by Freeze and Harlan (1969), and numerous physically based models have been developed following this blueprint. HydroGeoSphere (HGS), the code discussed in this review, is one of them. The origin of HGS is the code FRAC3DVS, developed by R. Therrien at the University of Waterloo as part of his doctoral work under the supervision of E.A. Sudicky (Therrien 1992). FRAC3DVS was designed to simulate variably saturated groundwater flow and advective-dispersive solute transport in porous or discretely fractured porous media. In 2002, a two-dimensional (2D) surface water flow and transport component were implemented in FRAC3DVS and the code was renamed HydroGeoSphere. Until recently, the code was free for academic research, while commercial users paid a license fee between 3000 and 6000 US dollars depending on the number of CPU cores the code will use in a parallel computational platform. The code can be downloaded by contacting the developers through the website: http://hydrogeosphere.org/. HGS has been designed to solve simple problems (e.g., regular geometry, steady-state saturated flow etc.) as well as very complex problems (e.g., integrated flow,

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