Free Online Groundwater Flow Simulator: Drawdown You Can Watch

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Click anywhere on the aquifer to start a well pumping from that moment. Each cone follows the Cooper and Jacob solution and where cones overlap the drawdowns add, which is exactly why real well fields are spaced apart. Toggle injection to recharge instead and watch a mound cancel a cone.

Hydrogeology you can poke

Textbooks draw the cone of depression as a frozen sketch; this simulator lets you grow one. Click the aquifer to start a well pumping and the drawdown spreads outward in real time, computed from the Cooper and Jacob solution at every point of the map. Add a second well nearby and the cones add where they overlap, which is well interference appearing on its own rather than being asserted. Toggle injection and a recharge mound pushes back.

Two pumping wells on an aquifer map with blue drawdown cones growing and overlapping where their influence meets
Every pumping well digs a cone of drawdown; where cones meet, they add.

Transmissivity, storativity, and pumping rate are all live controls, so the classic behaviors are one change away: low storativity spreads influence fast and far, high transmissivity keeps cones shallow and wide.

What to try

  • Two wells close together, then far apart: watch the shared drawdown that makes close spacing expensive.
  • Drop storativity from 0.0001 to 0.00001 and see confined aquifer behavior race across the map.
  • Pair a pumping well with an injection well and build an honest little dipole.
  • Pause at any moment and read the maximum drawdown a real permit would care about.

The physics and its limits

Each cone is the Cooper and Jacob approximation to Theis, superposed across wells, the same mathematics behind the pumping test tool on this site. The simulator assumes a uniform confined aquifer with no boundaries, exactly the assumptions the real methods make before hydrogeologists start arguing about the exceptions.

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