MT3DMS examples p8 and p10.

[AndreLuiz55]

Hello

I have a question about the p08 and p10 codes of the MT3DMS examples, both are showing the following error:

[Errno 2] No such file or directory: '..\data\mt3d_test\mt3dms\p08shead.dat'

[Errno 2] No such file or directory: '..\data\mt3d_test\mt3dms\p10shead.dat'

Where do I find this shead.dat file? I looked in the files created by MT3DMS and MODFLOW and I didn't find it.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

[wpbonelli]

Hi @AndreLuiz55, p08shead.dat and p10shead.dat are located in examples/data/mt3d_test/mt3dms relative to the project root, see here. Are you running the MT3DMS example notebook? Depending where you're running it from, you may need to modify the relative path. You can use os.getcwd() to check the working location as seen by the notebook process.

To avoid situations like this we could consider updating the example notebooks to use a utility function to locate example data instead of manually handling paths. The idea being to find examples/data automatically, providing the notebooks are run from somewhere inside the flopy project. (We already do this in the flopy tests, so it should be a minimum effort change.)

An alternative possibility (probably longer-term) could be to allow automatically downloading example data. I have seen other projects do this, e.g. PyVista. This could allow working with example models without cloning the project repo, e.g. something like:

from flopy import examples

mf, mt, conc, cvt, mvt = examples.download_mt3dms(workspace="some/dir")

Above omits parameters for simplicity. It would probably take some work to figure out the right approach, but just an idea.

[AndreLuiz55]

Thank you very much,

I will follow your recommendations.

[wpbonelli]

No problem at all. Feel free to reach out with any other issues.

I will follow up to let you know if we do implement either of the options described above.

[wpbonelli]

Hi @AndreLuiz55, were you able to get the MT3DMS examples working?

[AndreLuiz55]

Hello @w-bonelli , yes I did, thanks for the attention, I copied the files to my machine locally and indicated the path in the code. Then I will try to implement the tips you proposed. Thanks a lot for the help.

[wpbonelli]

Great, glad to hear it.

The options I mentioned are really intended for the flopy development team internally, sorry that wasn't clear. Just ideas to make things more convenient and avoid errors like the one you encountered.