Hydraulic tomography for characterizing the heterogeneity of pump-and-treat sites

Pump-and-treat (P&T) is a common method for remediation of groundwater contamination. However, this method may fail to efficiently extract the contaminated water due to the difficulty in describing the site-specific heterogeneity. Hydraulic tomography (HT) can possibly obtain high-resolution hydraulic properties of the heterogeneous aquifer by integrating information collected from a series of cross-hole pumping tests, while the costs for pumping and constructing wells are large. Since the pressure responses can be observed at available wells during P&T operation, application of HT techniques to characterize P&T sites has mutual benefits for characterizing the site hydrogeology effectively. The head responses at 44 wells were monitored for one year at U.S. Air Force Plant 44 site during the P&T operation. Numerical investigation using synthetic example and field data demonstrate that HT is a promising approach to characterize the P&T site heterogeneity using existing wells with a minor operation cost.