I would try to give names of some important software which one can use for working on different topics of

environmental engineering.

The most ubiquitous would probably be MATLAB. It is very well maintained, well documented, has plenty of
libraries, and is designed for scientific computing. The Open source version (Freely Downloadable) of matlab is
‘Scilab’.

1. Environmental Assessment and Decision Making:

 SimaPro or GaBi : for Life Cycle Assessment, Assessing Carbon Footprints (http://www.gabi-
software.com/malaysia/index/)
 STAN : to Compute Material Flow Analysis (MFA)
 WebHipre: (online open source) for Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)

Apart from above listed ones, there are several open source software are available for specific tasks
which one has to accomplish while performing Environmental or Risk Assessment.

2. Water or Wastewater Modelling:

 Matlab/ Scilab
 Statistica
 Berkeley Madonna
 Microsoft Excel

Type of software could be used for mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, solving differential
equations, etc.

3. Air Pollution Modelling:

R package, Matlab, Microsoft Excel, etc.
Apart from these conventional ones, several open-source and dedicated software packages are available
online to carry-out specific tasks in air pollution.

4. Environmental data, measuring, monitoring and planning:

 ArcMap : Geographical Information System (GIS) software.
 qGIS : Open source GIS software
 LEAM : Land use evolution and Impact assessment model

Apart from the above mentioned, Below are some softwares that you can use:

 SewerGEMS  Hec-GeoHMS
 LandGEM  StormCAD
 EPANET (https://www.epa.gov/water-  Interactive Groundwater (IGW)
research/epanet)  Qual2K
 Cantera  WaterCAD
 Gaseq  Water Evaluation and Planning System
 Storm Water Management Model (WEAP)
(SWMM)  BIOSCREEN
 Hec-HMS
For Further, Info visit: Environmental Modeling Software Library

In summary, the list of available software packages is endless, we have plenty of open-source and dedicated
applications for specific problems related to environmental engineering. If you want to master a few then I
would pick Microsoft Excel, Matlab and ArcMap/qGIS, knowing these three would solve 90% of problems that
one might face while studying or practicing environmental engineering.

Source : Shiva Kumar (Ph.D Civil and Environmental Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology)