This is a really interesting article. Is it possible to do these kinds of models without proprietary software?

From the looks of it, your aquifer data is represented in matrix form, and then you have the GIS data to go with it, so it seems like there's no voodoo, just a lot of moving parts. I guess I'm just curious about whether you trained to do this stuff 'by hand', as it were, and now the software takes a lot of the pain out of it.