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 preand 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 preand 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. Introduction: FREEWAT is an HORIZON 2020 project financed by the EU Commission, aiming at promoting water resource management by simplifying the application of the Water Framework Directive and other EU water related Directives (Rossetto et al., 2015). FREEWAT main result will be an open source and public domain GIS integrated modelling environment for the simulation of water quantity and quality in surface water and groundwater with an integrated water management and planning module, the latter being the topic described in this paper. The FREEWAT modelling environment is implemented as a plugin of the open source software QGIS as a desktop interface, it takes advantage of Spatialite as a geodatabase management system and FloPy (Bakker et. al., 2016) as reference python library to connect with hydrological codes, particularly MODFLOW-2005 (Harbaugh, 2005).