GMDSI Workshop: Simulator Partner Technologies: When to use What and Why

The last few years have seen considerable advances in methodologies and software that can be used in partnership with numerical simulation to support groundwater management and decision-making. These advances are both exciting and daunting. They are exciting because they provide modellers with a smorgasbord of powerful tools that can perform a wide variety of simulator-support tasks that include:

• local and global sensitivity analysis
• history-matching (regularized and ensemble-based);
• uncertainty quantification;
• non-stationary 2D and 3D stochastic field generation and manipulation;
• data space inversion;
• optimisation under uncertainty using real and surrogate models.

However, having such a wide variety of technologies and software at our disposal can also be a little troubling. How do you chose between them?

Actually, they all have their strengths and limitations. So there is no need to use one and reject the others. The challenge is to use them in complementary ways, exploiting their strengths and avoiding their weaknesses while pursuing the goals of decision support modelling. These are to quantify the uncertainties of decision-critical model predictions, while reducing these uncertainties to the extent that available data allow.

The workshop will provide a high-level overview of current simulator-support technologies. It will also provide many examples of their use in a variety of demanding decision-support contexts. At the same time, it will stress that technology alone does not guarantee that groundwater modelling will serve decision-making well. Modeller skill at problem decomposition is just as important. There are both theoretical and practical reasons for this. These will be examined.

The workshop will be more than simply a series of lectures. It will also include contributions from attendees who wish to ask questions, and/or share their experiences with the rest of us. The atmosphere will be relaxed and informal. It is meant for both modellers, those who use models to assist in groundwater management, and those who are stakeholders in groundwater management.

Presentations will be made, and discussions will be guided, by:

• John Doherty
• Jeremy White
• Catherine Moore
• Eduardo de Sousa

Registration includes morning and afternoon tea, lunch, and drinks afterwards.

This event is hosted and supported by:

The University of Western Australia and the Centre for Water and Spatial Science.

The Groundwater Modelling Decision Support Initiative and its partners, BHP, Rio Tinto, Flinders University and the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training.