MODFLOW 6, the U.S. Geological Survey Modular Hydrologic Model

MODFLOW is a popular open-source groundwater flow model distributed by the U.S. Geological Survey. For over 30 years, the MODFLOW program has been widely used by academics, private consultants, and government scientists to accurately, reliably, and efficiently simulate groundwater flow. With time, growing interest in surface and groundwater interactions, local refinement with nested and unstructured grids, karst groundwater flow, solute transport, and saltwater intrusion, has led to the development of numerous MODFLOW versions. Although these MODFLOW versions are often based on the core MODFLOW version (previously MODFLOW-2005), there are often incompatibilities that restrict their use with other MODFLOW versions. In many cases, development of these alternative MODFLOW versions has been challenging due to the underlying program structure, which was designed for the simulation of a single groundwater flow model using a regular MODFLOW grid consisting of layers, rows, and columns. A new object-oriented program and underlying framework called MODFLOW 6 was developed to provide a platform for supporting multiple models and multiple types of models within the same simulation. This version of MODFLOW is labeled with a "6" because it is the sixth core version of MODFLOW to be released by the USGS (previous core versions were released in 1984, 1988, 1996, 2000, and 2005). In the new design, any number of models can be included in a simulation. These models can be independent of one another with no interaction, they can exchange information with one another, or they can be tightly coupled at the matrix level by adding them to the same numerical solution. Transfer of information between models is isolated to exchange objects, which allow models to be developed and used independently of one another. Within this new framework, a regional-scale groundwater model may be coupled with multiple local-scale groundwater models. Or, a surface-water flow model could be coupled to multiple groundwater flow models. The framework naturally allows for future extensions to include the simulation of solute transport.