HydroSkripts in Hannover
I’m Sarah Collins and I
work as a Groundwater Modeller at the British Geological Survey. In May, thanks to the GERC Early Career
Researchers Development Fund, I was given the opportunity to travel to
Hannover, Germany, to work at the German Geological Survey (BGR). I was working
with experienced researchers Drs Georg Houben and Vincent Post and fellow early
career researcher Dr Carlos Morel Guevara on an idea that Vincent has had for a
while.
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| The Neues Rathaus 'New Town Hall' in Hannover |
Our plan was to develop a
library of analytical solutions to groundwater flow and transport processes –
named HydroSkripts – coded up in the programming language Python. But why would anyone be interested in
analytical solutions, when we have such sophisticated, powerful numerical
modelling software? I hear you ask. (Or perhaps not, depending on your
knowledge of groundwater modelling… But it is a reasonable question.) Modellers
often end up producing their own model codes for new tasks, as it affords a degree
of freedom that commercial software cannot provide. And what do I do every time
I build a new numerical model? I search through my line manager’s collection of
text books looking for analytical solutions to benchmark my model against.
This is not the only use of
analytical models; they also provide a quick estimate to questions such as How will abstraction at this borehole affect
water levels?, particularly to those without the resources or expertise to
build a numerical model. Our goal was to bring these analytical models from
numerous different sources together and to make them as quick and easy to
access and use as possible. The key to our HydroSkripts library will be its
search feature, which will allow users to look up the appropriate model based
on a description of the problem, without having to trawl through those text
books and papers!
In Hannover, we made a
great start to the work. We have since gained a fifth collaborator, Dr Dylan
Irvine of Flinders University, and work continues through our git account – a
version control system that allows coders to work seamlessly in parallel. Our
aim is to finish coding the identified solutions, write a short paper to
publicise the work and then release the code on a public git, so that
researchers and students all over the world can use the tool and add to it.
Keep an eye out for HydroSkripts!
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