ParFlow Sand Tank: A tool for groundwater exploration

Abstract

The ParFlow Sand Tank model is an open source application designed to allow users to interactively simulate and visualize groundwater movement through the subsurface. The app is designed for both research and education; teaching hydrogeology concepts and making it easy explore and run sophisticated groundwater simulations. Our goal is to support increased accessibility and usability of research grade hydrology tools for research and teaching. The Sand Tank application simulates groundwater and surface water fluxes as well as contaminant transport in real time using the integrated physical hydrology model ParFlow (Kollet & Maxwell, 2006; Maxwell & Miller, 2005; Osei-Kuffuor et al., 2014) and the particle tracking code EcoSlim (Maxwell et al., 2019). ParFlow is a numerical hydrology model that simulates spatially distributed groundwater and surface water flow. It is a well established research tool with more than 90 publications documenting its development use to advance our understanding of groundwater dynamics and groundwater surface water interactions from the hillslope to the continental scale e.g. (Condon et al., 2020; Condon & Maxwell, 2019; Maxwell & Condon, 2016). It is designed for efficient parallel computation and has been run on many platforms spanning from laptops to supercomputers. However, one of the challenges of ParFlow is that it requires significant training and hydrologic expertise to develop simulations. The Sand Tank application makes this model accessible to anyone for education and exploration. Our application uses ParFlow for its simulation backend and ParaView for the data loading and processing. The communication infrastructure relies on the ParaViewWeb framework. We use model templates deployed in Docker images to setup the Sand Tank framework. Users can build the application locally or interact with it through our web deployment. When interacting with a template users can interactively change model parameters like subsurface processes or pump/inject water into the subsurface and watch the system respond to their changes in real time as the simulation runs. Additionally, our template setup will allow more advanced users to build custom templates of increasing complexity for both research and educational purposes.