Revolution of MODFLOW: Past and Future

Revolution of MODFLOW – Past and Future

MODFLOW has endured for 30 years. That is, I believe, attributable to principles on which MODFLOW was based. Among those principles are: ease of enhancement, ease of debugging, ease of understanding, portability and a complete and standardized documentation. Those principles controlled the design decisions of MODFLOW. In recent years it has become evident that there is a need for a model that integrates ground-water flow, ground-water transport, salt-water flow unsaturated flow and surface- water flow. It appears reasonable to try to integrate those additional capabilities into MODFLOW. The aforementioned principles and the design decisions that resulted from them will have to be reconsidered. In doing so, the changes to MODFLOW will be revolutionary rather than evolutionary.