About shallow groundwater flow (78% of precipitation) Imes and Emmett (1993) wrote that this intracellular flow that is discharged into local rivers and springs and is not accounted for in the box model representation. But they also comment that ~4000 cfs are sinked into streams within the aquifer region, ~3100 cfs were sinked into border rivers such as the Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, and Neosho. The author’s understanding here is that the local rivers have some export from shallow flow or flow between cells in the model and that is not considered lost from the aquifer proper. The total export of Ozark rivers from the aquifer between the Salem and Springfield plateaus is approximately 3100 cfs of the 22% of precipitation that is considered to be in the aquifer. A similar approach is used in newer models. The water balance illustrated in Figure 9 uses a “soil water balance” model to account for recharge distribution to the aquifer from surface and shallow processes (Clark et al., 2019), but apparently it can also quantify the intracell flow ignored by the 1993 (Imes and Emmett) model. The greater value of the newer modelling process is in the greater precipitation seasonally during a future of climate change and the effect on climate forced rise temperature related quantities (evapotranspiration for example) in the soil water balance model and the ability to create water balances in smaller sub-regions of the aquifer. In the meantime, for pre development conditions the authors (Clark et al., 2019) commented that the soil water balance results (Hays et al., 2016) were not greatly different than the Imes and Emmett assumptions in Table 5. To be absolutely certain of these refinements in terms of water distribution to streams and aquifer requires more detailed study than this project timing allows and is required to use these models competently.