Matching Surface Water and Groundwater Elevations in Mud Lake using HydroGeoSphere

Abstract

Groundwater and surface water models are becoming more a more prominent method to approximate the complex physical flow processes that are encountered in our natural environment. These models rarely integrate surface water and groundwater flow into the same package, and if they do, are often computationally expensive. HydroGeoSphere is a fully integrated model and contains two sub-models; one is the 2D kinematic wave approximation of the Saint Venant?s equation for runoff and channel flow, and the other is the Richards? equation for variably saturated groundwater flow. This paper describes the validation and use of the integrated flow model, HydroGeoSphere, in the Lower Mud Lake region.