A probabilistic method for delineation of wellhead protection areas

TL;DRAbstract

Delineation of Wellhead Protection Areas (WHPAs) is a basic tool for the protection of drinkable groundwater resources. At the present, WHPAs definition is usually carried out according to the backward particle tracking model, a deterministic model based on the concept of the time of travel (TOT); it accounts only of advective mechanism of transport ignoring the hydrodynamic dispersion. The aim of this study is to present a WHPAs method which accounts of dispersion phenomena without requiring too many additional computation, compared with the common backward particle tracking method. For this purpose a backward probabilistic (BP) method, based on the adjoint equation of the classical transport advective-dispersive equation (Neupauer and Wilson, 1999), has been implemented. With only one simulation, for every point of the model domain the probability that a solute particle located in that point will reach the well within the fixed TOT is computed. This result is obtained running a flow

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