Simulating Piecewise-Linear Surface Water and Ground Water Interactions with MODFLOW

The standard MODFLOW packages offer limited capabilities to model piecewise-linear boundary conditions to describe ground water–surface water interaction. Specifically, MODFLOW is incapable of representing a Cauchy-type boundary with different resistances for discharge or recharge conditions. Such a more sophisticated Cauchy boundary condition is needed to properly represent surface waters alternatively losing water through the bottom (high resistance) or gaining water mostly near the water surface (low resistance). One solution would be to create a new package for MODFLOW to accomplish this. However, it is also possible to combine multiple instances of standard packages in a single cell to the same effect. In this specific example, the general head boundary package is combined with the drain package to arrive at the desired piecewise-linear behavior. In doing so, the standard USGS MODFLOW version can be used without any modifications at the expense of a minor increase in preprocessing and postprocessing and computational effort. The extra preprocessing for creating the input and extra postprocessing to determine the water balance in terms of the physical entities from the MODFLOW cell fluxes per package can be taken care of by a user interface.