Preliminary Model of Saturated Flow Using Cellular Automata

A fully-coupled from surface to groundwater hydrological model is being developed based on the Extended Cellular Automata formalism (XCA), which proves to be very suitable for high performance computing. In this paper, a preliminary module related to three-dimensional saturated flow in porous media is presented and implemented by using the OpenCAL parallel software library. This allows to exploit distributed systems with heterogeneous computational devices. The proposed model is evaluated in terms of both accuracy and precision of modeling results and computational performance, using single layered three-dimensional test cases at different resolutions (from local to regional scale), simulating pumping from one or more wells, river-groundwater interactions and varying soil hydraulic properties. Model accuracy is compared with analytic, when available, or numerical (MODFLOW 2005) solution, while the computational performance is evaluated using an Intel Xeon CPU socket. Overall, the XCA-based model proves to be accurate and, mainly, computationally very efficient thanks to the many options and tools available with the OpenCAL library.