Effects of Model Grid Resolution and Parameter Upscaling on Predictions of Water Flow in Heterogeneous, Unsaturated Porous Media.
Abstract
Accurate prediction of water flow and solute transport in heterogeneous, unsaturated porous media is generally hampered by our inability to 1) adequately characterize the physical and hydraulic properties of the porous media, and 2) to represent these properties at the appropriate scales in our models. A methodology has recently been developed that uses both hard and soft data, geostatistical simulation methods, and scaling concepts to generate spatially distributed and upscaled estimates of soil physical and hydraulic properties, conditioned on field-measured initial water content distributions. The methodology is used to parameterize a numerical flow and transport model for simulations of a 3D subsurface water injection experiment conducted in highly heterogeneous interbedded sands and silts at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State. Simulated and observed results are compared, and the effects of model grid resolution and parameter upscaling are presented.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2002
- Bibcode:
- 2002AGUFM.H62B0863R
- Keywords:
-
- 1831 Groundwater quality;
- 1832 Groundwater transport;
- 3230 Numerical solutions