2019 Darcy Lecture
John
Doherty
Watermark
Numerical
Computing
Dancing with Models - The Importance of Model Partner Software
Monday,
November
4,
2019
DC
1302
at
2:30
p.m.
Everyone
Welcome
Refreshments
Numerical simulators of groundwater flow and transport cannot fulfill their decision-support potential on their own. Instead, they must be used in partnership with equally sophisticated software that links models to data acquired at sites that they simulate - and that links models to the decisions that they are intended to support. As they “dance” with a model, these software packages can accomplish tasks such as history-matching, uncertainty analysis, predictive hypothesis-testing, sensitivity analysis, management optimization, and optimization under uncertainty.
The importance of model partner software is not nearly as widely appreciated in the groundwater industry as it should be. Model developers often design input/output protocols that make linkage to partner software difficult or impossible. Model users often build models that are unnecessarily complex, take too long to run, and have questionable numerical health. Education in model-valueadding numerical algorithms is rarely offered to modelers by universities. Graphical user interfaces do not provide comprehensive support for the wide range of ancillary tasks that decision-support modeling requires.
This lecture will explore how models can best serve the decision-making process. In doing so, it demonstrates the indispensable role that model-value-adding software should play in this process. It also addresses some currently available packages, as well as an easy-to-use, public domain, parallel model run manager with a nonintrusive model interface that allows rapid development of model partner software by any programmer.
John Doherty, Ph.D., is the author of PEST, a software package that is widely used for groundwater model calibration and uncertainty analysis. He has worked for more than 35 years in the water industry, first as an exploration geophysicist and then as a modeler. Doherty been employed by both government and industry, and has also worked at numerous universities where he undertook research and supervised postgraduate students. Currently he works for his own company, Watermark Numerical Computing, doing consulting, research, programming, and education, mainly on issues related to model deployment in support of environmental management and impact assessment.