What is the analytic element method?
The analytic element method for regional groundwater modeling was developed at the end of the seventies by Otto Strack at the University of Minnesota (Strack and Haitjema, 1981a). There are two books about the analytic element method, Groundwater Mechanics by O. D. L. Strack, Prentice Hall, 1989, contains detailed mathematical descriptions of the analytic elements and their numerical implementation. Analytic Element Modeling of Groundwater Flow by H. M. Haitjema, Academic Press, 1995, provides the basic theoretical framework for the analytic element method and focuses on its use. This new method avoids the discretization of a groundwater flow domain by grids or element networks. Instead, only the surface water features in the domain are discretized, broken up in sections, and entered into the model as input data. Each of these stream sections or lake sections is represented by closed form analytic solutions: the analytic elements. The comprehensive solution to a complex, regional groun
