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Course description

Groundwater is an important resource but represents also a risk. The increasing human use and consequences of climate change pose new challenges for groundwater management. To meet these challenges, the students learn the basics for describing the groundwater flow and analytical and numerical calculation methods. A physical experiment, an exercise applying the programming language Python as well as using a program for numerical groundwater flow modelling on the own computer are part of the course.

Course content

• basics of the movement of water in a porous medium
• analytical solutions for selected special cases
• basics of numerical groundwater modelling
• extraction and infiltration systems (including wells)
• data collection
• special groundwater management issues (mining swamp, soil movements, high groundwater levels, geothermal energy, water resource management in arid areas, salt input near the coast)
• fundamentals of groundwater condition
• project processing and project management
• job prospects
• tenders and offers
• legal aspects of groundwater management in Germany

Learning Objectives

Knowing the basics of groundwater management and groundwater flow, deriving and using simple calculation methods, gaining initial experience with numerical groundwater modelling and programming in Python, teaching professional perspectives, overview of the particular challenges of (international) groundwater management.