Quantifying Groundwater Flow and Solute Transport Processes through Modelling and Experiments
A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Hydrogeology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 April 2024) | Viewed by 9614
Special Issue Editors
Interests: contaminant transport; unsaturated zone; groundwater, modelling; hydrogeophysics; spatial heterogeneity
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: hydrogeology; groundwater modelling; natural tracers; isotopes; heat transport; coastal aquifers; saltwater intrusion; groundwater–surface-water interaction
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Groundwater is an important source of water for drinking, irrigation, industrial purposes and maintaining ecosystems, both quantity and quality determines its use. Groundwater quality is affected by natural conditions and human activities at multiple scales. Sources of diffuse pollution can be agriculture or atmospheric deposition, while landfills, airports, mining, and industry are potential point sources. The study of contamination and solute transport is frequently linked to the development of models to reproduce flow and aquifer conditions. Chemicals and contaminants can react, be degraded, or transformed during their transit through aquifers. In the context of global change, the knowledge on processes and modelling techniques is highly relevant. The exponential growth in computer power combined with increased user friendliness of groundwater models has facilitated the use of models to estimate potential effects on groundwater quality.
The last decades have also provided new methods for characterizing and monitoring subsurface properties and processes, such as hydrogeophysics, improved well logging techniques and field and lab tests. Hence, subsurface heterogeneity can more easily be implemented in standard groundwater modelling software, that together with parameter estimation tools provide more realistic pictures of transport in groundwater systems.
With all these improvements are we able to give better advice to practitioners on how to deal with contaminant issues? Water and solute travel times from a few months to hundreds of thousands of years reflects different climate conditions and impact of human activities in a complex way. Identifying the origin and fate of contaminants requires extensive field campaigns that later can be simulated with numerical models. The choice of conceptual model is still one of the most important steps of modelling, how do we know the simplifications done in this step are the best? Despite technical advancements in groundwater flow modelling capabilities, the complexity of bio-geochemical reactions often leads to a simplification of flow to steady state situation. However transient boundary conditions, e.g. recharge including contaminants from the unsaturated zone, combined with highly heterogeneous subsurface may be of paramount importance to solute transport and the pattern of contaminant transport, reactions, storage and the final composition of the water released at the discharge zone.
Prof. Dr. Helen K. French
Dr. Carlos Duque
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- groundwater modelling
- contamination
- groundwater quality
- field experiments
- lab experiments
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