NEW version of HGS PREMIUM April 2026 (REVISION 2945)
The HydroGeoSphere April 2026 release is now available for download.
This month’s update focuses on improvements to velocity field computation, solver robustness and diagnostic reporting, along with several important bug fixes affecting restart behavior and fully saturated flow simulations. Together, these updates improve numerical accuracy, solver performance, and model diagnostics across a wide range of HydroGeoSphere (HGS) workflows.
Snow depth output added to observation files
Added nodal snow depth (SnowDepthSWE) to observation well and observation point output files when the rain and snowmelt boundary condition is active.
New solver convergence control commands (see hydrosphere_ref.pdf)
New command flow solver check convergence on initial residual
New command transport solver check convergence on initial residual
These commands allow early exit of the linear solver when the initial residual already satisfies convergence criteria, improving solver efficiency.
New solver divergence monitoring command
Added the command linear residual maximum increase, which detects solver divergence based on large increases in the residual norm.
Improved porous medium velocity precision
Fixed a bug that caused significant precision loss in computed porous medium velocities for fully saturated flow simulations using hexahedral block elements.
Updated initial head Tecplot export handling
Refactored the command initial head to tecplot so that it correctly accounts for initial head values specified using restart files.
Solver diagnostics and performance improvements (see hydrosphere_ref.pdf)
Updated the commands flow solver detail and transport solver detail to include a new verbosity level and improved diagnostic reporting.
Improved the serial and parallel linear solvers to enhance robustness, reduce memory usage, and improve parallel efficiency.
Improved warning message reporting
Updated warning message behavior in grok so that when an error occurs, all warning messages accumulated up to that point are still reported.
This makes debugging model setup issues easier and more transparent.
Fixes for velocity field computation commands
Resolved bugs in the commands compute velocity field from head and compute velocity field from head and conc that caused incorrect reading of head and concentration values from the prefixo.hen and prefixo.cen files. These fixes ensure more accurate velocity field calculations from restart-based inputs.
Fix for restart file initialization behavior
Corrected an issue where initial heads or concentrations specified using restart file for heads or restart file for concentrations were ignored when a restart index of zero was specified in the parallelindx.dat file.
Documentation updates
The HydroGeoSphere Reference Manual (hydrosphere_ref.pdf) has been updated to reflect all new commands and enhancements.
And as always, we are committed to the continued improvement to the user experience. Do you have suggestions for new commands or improvements to the user experience? Send your ideas to support@aquanty.com!
The latest installers are available on the HGS download page and a full list of changes/updates can be found in the release notes.
Download the April 2026 release of HydroGeoSphere here: https://www.aquanty.com/hgs-download
Review the release notes here: https://www.aquanty.com/updates