David Amores

SYMPLE

SYMPLE offers a School of Hydrogeological Modelling hosted by professionals and academics from all over the world. The courses blend theory with practice in ways that our unique industry requires. Such courses are comparatively rare and urgently needed. he traditional workflow begins with field investigations, proceeds to the building of a conceptual model, and then seeks to build an often too complex numerical model on that basis. The underlying principle of this approach is that we can deterministically simulate what happens under the ground. This is a demonstrably erroneous premise. The "traditional" method has been leading us to widespread distrust of what modelling can achieve. SYMPLE intends to teach an emerging paradigm supported by the latest ideas and software for data assimilation: "Starting from the problem and working backwards". Turning into practice this paradigm requires to: - clearly identify the groundwater management problem to be solved, avoiding the "better understanding" as principal aim of the model; - identify the type of data that has the greatest capacity to reduce the uncertainties associated with decision-critical predictions of system behaviour; - design a simulation strategy that serves the decision-support imperative of quantifying and reducing those uncertainties. Development of better strategies to address existing and pressing problems requires the same data and software mostly already available (PEST and PEST++ suites), but a new mindset. The modelling approach proposed by SYMPLE is quicker and less expensive because it is: - management targeted; - only as complex as it needs to be to serve the decision-support demands; - supported by project-related strategies through specific software or workflows. That is, modelling should be complex enough to assimilate data and reduce uncertainty, but strategically simple because it is decision-focused.