Hydrotrack: a graphical software system for the simulation of pollutant discharges in water

HydroTrack is a software system to simulate coastal and river hydrodynamics and pollutant transport. HydroTrack is composed of six subsystems: Geography Subsystem, Grid Subsystem, Models Subsystem, Graphical Subsystem, Data Management Subsystem and Help Subsystem. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is written in Microsoft® Visual BasicTM to run under the WindowsTM operating system while the models are coded in Fortran 77. One of the main objectives of the design of HydroTrack was to have a friendly graphical interface to allow the user easy definition of modelling regions such as coasts, estuaries and rivers, lenient communication with the models, and powerful graphical capabilities. This article describes HydroTrack functionality, its main internal software information structures, together with an example simulation of pollutant discharges in the Maracaibo estuary in Venezuela