Worldwide, billions of people rely on fresh groundwater reserves for their domestic, agricultural and industrial water use. Extreme droughts and excessive groundwater pumping put pressure on water authorities in maintaining sustainable water usage. High-resolution integrated models are valuable assets in supporting them. The Netherlands Hydrological Instrument (NHI) provides the Dutch water authorities with open source modeling software and data. However, NHI integrated groundwater models often require long run times and large memory usage, therefore strongly limiting their application. As a solution, we present a distributed memory parallelization, focusing on the National Hydrological Model. Depending on the level of integration, we show that significant speedups can be obtained up to two orders of magnitude. As far as we know, this is the first reported integrated groundwater parallelization of an operational hydrological model used for national-scale integrated water management and policy making. The parallel model code and data are freely available.

Fresh groundwater reserves, being of vital importance for more than a billion of people living in the coastal zone, are being threatened by saltwater intrusion due to anthropogenic activities and climate change. High resolution three-dimensional (3D), variable-density (VD), groundwater flow and salt transport (FT) numerical models are increasingly being used to support water managers and decision makers in their strategic planning and measures for dealing with the problem of fresh water shortages. However, these computer models typically require long runtimes and large memory usage, making them impractical to use without parallelization. Here, we parallelize SEAWAT, and show that with our parallelization 3D-VD-FT modeling is now feasible for a wide range of hydrogeologists, since a) speedups of more than two orders of magnitude can be obtained as illustrated in this paper, and b) large 3D-VD-FT models are feasible with memory requirements far exceeding single machine memory.