Case Study: Ammer Catchment

Abstract

This chapter explains the step by step development of a steady state groundwater flow model with the help of the geographical information system ArcGIS and the numerical modelling tool OpenGeoSys. This groundwater flow model of a catchment in southwestern Germany was developed in the context of the Water Earth System Science (WESS) competence cluster. Details on the project may be found in an article by Grathwohl et al. (2013) or at www.wess.info. This case study focusses on the identification of flow paths and travel times of groundwater with respect to a number of production well sites. To this end, the best possible representation of the groundwater flow system was implemented as an OpenGeoSys simulation model. For more details on the development of a conceptual model of groundwater flow for the study area and the practical context of this work the interested reader is referred to articles by Pavlovskiy and Selle (2014) and Selle et al. (2013a).