Guidance for further study

[Zhongkang Yan]

Dear all, 

I am a beginner just starting to work with PFLOTRAN, and I would greatly appreciate your advice on how to proceed with further learning. 

My research interest is in simulating groundwater contaminant transport. I am familiar with the basic principles of groundwater hydrology, but I have little experience with Fortran coding or parallel computing. So far, I have read the user manual and completed most of the short course examples, and I feel comfortable with the setup of the basic modules. 

At this stage, I am uncertain about the best next step, as I do not yet have groundwater or contaminant data. Should I focus on reading papers to identify scientific questions and datasets, try to replicate case studies from the literature, or spend more time learning the model itself, such as by exploring the source code? 

Any guidance or suggestions from the community would be greatly appreciated. 

Best,

Zhongkang

[Hammond, Glenn E]

Zhongkang,

What is your primary short-term objective? Is there a specific engineering or science problem that you are attempting to model? Are you wanting to develop code? Or are you simply interested in learning more about modeling?

Thanks,

Glenn

From: pflotra...@googlegroups.com <pflotra...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Zhongkang Yan <yzk...@163.com>
Date: Tuesday, September 30, 2025 at 7:32 PM
To: pflotran-users <pflotra...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [pflotran-users: 8575] Guidance for further study

Check twice before you click! This email originated from outside PNNL.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pflotran-users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pflotran-user...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pflotran-users/73b2329f-b819-4cf6-a768-851a8b34312dn%40googlegroups.com.

[Zhongkang]

Dear Glenn,

Thank you for your response. My previously planned direction was to work on site-scale groundwater contaminant reactive transport modeling, but I do not have any measured data available, either for groundwater levels or contaminant concentrations.

So, should I first look for publicly available data and scientific questions to work on? Or should I spend more time getting familiar with modeling knowledge and later see what data I can find, and then decide on the engineering or scientific problem?

My primary objective is to make the simulations more accurate, but I am not sure whether just learning more about modeling knowledge would be sufficient.

Best regards,
Zhongkang

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "pflotran-users" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/pflotran-users/-WJUcbdh9a0/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to pflotran-user...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pflotran-users/PH0PR09MB78368E8ED034705784A038A89AE7A%40PH0PR09MB7836.namprd09.prod.outlook.com.

[Hammond, Glenn E]

Zhongkang,

If you don’t have a specific site or problem to focus on, I suggest spending time learning more about modeling. A good starting point is benchmarking PFLOTRAN against other codes or analytical solutions to build confidence in its accuracy. This process also helps you engage with the developer and user community by sharing discrepancies or questions that arise.

Discrepancies often stem from discretization errors, which typically improve with refined spatial or temporal discretization. I recommend testing refinements before reaching out to the community for discussion. Contributions from these efforts can be valuable for PFLOTRAN demonstrations, and we would be happy to credit your work.

Let me know if you have further questions as you proceed.

Glenn

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pflotran-users/207336ab.f46.199a3c7cc93.Coremail.yzk1116%40163.com.