  Current groundwater models face a significant challenge in their
implementation due to heavy computational burdens. To overcome this, our work
proposes a cost-effective emulator that efficiently and accurately forecasts
the impact of abstraction in an aquifer. Our approach uses a deep neural
operator (DeepONet) to learn operators that map between infinite-dimensional
function spaces via deep neural networks. The goal is to infer the distribution
of hydraulic head in a confined aquifer in the presence of a pumping well. We
successfully tested the DeepONet on four problems, including two forward
problems, an inverse analysis, and a nonlinear system. Additionally, we propose
a novel extension of the DeepONet-based architecture to generate accurate
predictions for varied hydraulic conductivity fields and pumping well locations
that are unseen during training. Our emulator's predictions match the target
data with excellent performance, demonstrating that the proposed model can act
as an efficient and fast tool to support a range of tasks that require
repetitive forward numerical simulations or inverse simulations of groundwater
flow problems. Overall, our work provides a promising avenue for developing
cost-effective and accurate groundwater models.
