Large-scale groundwater flow and transport modeling: Methodology and application to the Meuse Basin – Belgium

To meet the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive, an
integrated water management project named PIRENE was initiated by the
Walloon Region of Belgium. A partner of this project, the Hydrogeology
Group of the University of Liège, is in charge of the development of a physically
based transient groundwater flow and transport model for the Walloon
part of the Meuse Basin (approximately 17 000 km2). To face the problems
associated with this large-scale model, a general approach has been developed
that combines a hydrogeological database and GIS systems to manage data.
Techniques of spatial discretization have been applied that optimize the
number of unknowns. For modelling groundwater flow and transport on a
large scale, a new numerical approach called the Hybrid Finite Element
Mixing Cell (HFEMC) has been implemented in the 3-D simulator SUFT3D.