Mipwa: Water managers develop their own high-resolution groundwater model tools

The interests of the various parties involved in water management often conflict. The project "Development of a Methodology for Interactive Planning for WAter management" (MIPWA) is intended to resolve these conflicts. For the first time in The Netherlands, 17 water management stakeholders joined forces to develop a large-scale high-resolution decision-making tool for groundwater-related issues. It consists of a groundwater model database, an impulse-response database and the user-friendly interactive modelling tool iMOD. Each conceptual choice was made by the whole group of stakeholders themselves, based on the choices provided to this group by model experts of various research institutes and consultancies. This has strengthened the cooperation between the participating organisations enormously, and created a level playing field for environmental planning processes. Both technical and interactive consensus-building challenges had to be tackled in the MIPWA project. Numerous innovations have proven to be effective: grid-computing, up-scaling, large data storage, accessibility via the internet and interactive decision-making processes.