Large-scale groundwater flow and transport modelling: methodology and application to the Meuse Basin, Belgium

To meet the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive, ail integrated water management project named PIRENE was initiated by the Walloon Region of Belgium. A partner of this prcject, the Hydrogeology Group of the University of Li ge, is in charge of the development of a physically based transient groundwater flow and transport model for the Walloon part of the Meuse Basin (approximately 17 000 km(2)). To face the problems associated with this large-scale model, a general approach has been developed that combines a hydrogeological database and GIS systems to manage data. Techniques of spatial discretization have been applied that optimize the number of unknowns. For modelling groundwater flow and transport on a large scale, a new numerical approach called the Hybrid Finite Element Mixing Cell (HFEMC) has been implemented in the 3-D simulator SUFT3D.