Calibration and Reliability in Groundwater Modelling: Credibility of Modelling

(Proceedings of ModelCARE 2007 Conference, held in Denmark, September 2007). IAHS Publ. 320, 2008, 108-113.

MIPWA: Water managers develop their own high-resolution groundwater model tools

Judith Snepvangers¹, Bennie Minnema¹, Wilbert Berendrecht¹, Peter Vermeulen¹, Aris Lourens¹, Wim van der Linden¹,
Mike Duijn¹, Jan van Bakel², Willem-Jan Zaadnoordijk³,
Marcel Boerefijn⁴, Margo Meeuwissen⁵ & Vera Lagendijk⁶

1 TNO Build Environment and Geosciences, PO box 80.015, 3508 TA Utrecht, The Netherlands

judith.snepvangers@tno.nl

2 Alterra, PO Box 47, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands

3 Royal Haskoning, PO Box 8064, 9702 KB Groningen, The Netherlands

4 Tauw, PO Box 133, 7400 AC Deventer, The Netherlands

5 Waterschap Groot Salland, PO Box 60, 8000 AB Zwolle, The Netherlands

6 Drinking Water Company Vitens BV, PO Box 400, 8901 BE Leeuwarden, The Netherlands

Abstract The interests of the various parties involved in water management often conflict. The project “Development of a Methodology for Interactive Planning for WAter management” (MIPWA) is intended to resolve these conflicts. For the first time in The Netherlands, 17 water management stakeholders joined forces to develop a large-scale high-resolution decision-making tool for groundwater-related issues. It consists of a groundwater model database, an impulse-response database and the user-friendly interactive modelling tool iMOD. Each conceptual choice was made by the whole group of stakeholders themselves, based on the choices provided to this group by model experts of various research institutes and consultancies. This has strengthened the cooperation between the participating organisations enormously, and created a level playing field for environmental planning processes. Both technical and interactive consensus-building challenges had to be tackled in the MIPWA project. Numerous innovations have proven to be effective: grid-computing, up-scaling, large data storage, accessibility via the internet and interactive decision-making processes.

Key words groundwater modelling; decision-support; high resolution; scaling techniques; grid computing; graphical user interface