Inversion of Hydrological Tracer Test Data Using TomogrpahicConstraints
A reasonable description of the hydraulic conductivity structure is a prerequisite for modeling contaminant transport. However, formulations of hydrogeological inverse problems utilizing hydrogeological data only often fail to reliably resolve features at a resolution required for accurately predicting transport. Incorporation of geophysical data into the inverse problem offers the potential to increase this resolution. In this study, we invert hydrological tracer test data using the shape and relative magnitude variations derived from geophysical tomographic data to regionalize a hydrogeological inverse problem in order to estimate the hydraulic conductivity structure. Our approach does not require that the petrophysical relationship be known a-priori, but that it is linear and stationary within each geophysical anomaly. However, tomograms are imperfect models of geophysical properties and geophysical properties are not necessarily strongly linked to hydraulic conductivity. Therefore, we focus on synthetic examples where the correlation between radar velocity and hydraulic conductivity, as well as the geophysical data acquisition errors, are varied in order to assess what aspects of the hydraulic conductivity structure we can expect to resolve under different conditions. The results indicate that regularization of the tracer inversion procedure using geophysical data improves estimates of hydraulic conductivity. We find that even under conditions of corrupted geophysical data, we can accurately estimate the effective hydraulic conductivity and areas of high and low hydraulic conductivity. However, given imperfect geophysical data, our results suggest that we cannot expect accurate estimates of the variability of the hydraulic conductivity structure.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Director. Office of Science. Office of Biological andEnvironmental Research. Environmental Remediation Sciences Division; Department of Earth Sciences/Geophysics. Uppsala UniversitySweden
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 886765
- Report Number(s):
- LBNL-54603; WRERAQ; R&D Project: 465103; BnR: YN0100000; TRN: US200616%%1162
- Journal Information:
- Water Resources Research, Vol. 42, Issue 4; Related Information: Journal Publication Date: 04/2006; ISSN 0043-1397
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Data-domain correlation approach for joint hydrogeologic inversion of time-lapse hydrogeologic and geophysical data
Estimation of field-scale soil hydraulic and dielectric parameters through joint inversion of GPR and hydrological data