Open Source for Water Management: including capabilities of MODFLOW-OWHM in the FREEWAT GIS modelling environment
FREEWAT is an ongoing GIS environment to serve as pre- and post-processor for running simulations of surface-/groundwater interaction, with the possibility to activate several features accounting for the different water stresses. This paper reports the capability related to address water resource management problems, by activating management tools available in the MODFLOW-OWHM code. The latter is integrated in FREEWAT, which appears as composite plugin of the well-know QGIS software (QGIS, 2016). Therefore, all the necessary pre- and post-process procedures can be run effectively within QGIS, also in conjunction with the several tools for GIS analysis already included in QGIS. It turns out a simple and intuitive user interface to manage the simulation of complex problem in which the mutual interaction among surface waters, groundwaters and anthropic water demand/supply terms can be handled. The development phase of such tools is already at an advanced stage, while next work will be focused on producing real-world applications to serve as tutorial for interest Users.