Next Generation Computers Warrant Next Generation Groundwater Models

Modern hydrologic models have extraordinary capabilities for representing complex process in surface-subsurface systems. These capabilities have revolutionized the way we conceptualize flow systems, but how to represent uncertainty in simulated flow systems is not as well developed. Currently, characterizing model uncertainty can be computationally expensive, in part, because the techniques are appended to the numerical methods rather than seamlessly integrated. The next generation of computers, however, presents opportunities to reformulate the modeling problem so that the uncertainty components are handled more directly within the flow system simulation. Misconceptions about quantum computing abound and they will not be a "silver bullet" for solving all complex problems, but they might be leveraged for certain kinds of highly uncertain problems, such as groundwater (GW). The point of this issue paper is that the GW community could try to revise the foundations of our models so that the governing equations being solved are tailored specifically for quantum computers. The goal moving forward should not just be to accelerate the models we have, but also to address their deficiencies. Embedding uncertainty into the models by evolving distribution functions will make predictive GW modeling more complicated, but doing so places the problem into a complexity class that is highly efficient on quantum computing hardware. Next generation GW models could put uncertainty into the problem at the very beginning of a simulation and leave it there throughout, providing a completely new way of simulating subsurface flows.