The National Groundwater Association journal Groundwater published an article co-authored by Clear Creek Co-Founder and Principal Hydrogeologist Doug Bartlett, RG, CHG, and Senior Hydrogeologist Paul Plato, RG, presenting a method for utilizing solute transport processes to quantify source contribution using a unit-concentration approach.
“A Unit-Concentration Method to Quantify Source Contribution” was co-written by Vivek Bedekar, Christopher Neville, Matthew J. Tonkin, R. Douglas Bartlett, and Paul Plato.
Clear Creek has used this technique to assess the sources of water to particular production wells in addition to tracking the movement of recharged water to Aquifer Storage Recovery (ASR) wells for permitting purposes. Learn more about Clear Creek’s groundwater modeling capabilities.
Abstract
Solute migration is typically simulated to describe and estimate the fate and transport of contaminants in groundwater. The unit-concentration approach is investigated here as a method to enable solute transport simulations to expand the capabilities of groundwater flow modeling. The unit-concentration method uses a concentration value of one to identify sources of water to be assessed and a concentration of zero for all other water sources. The distribution of concentration thus obtained, unlike particle tracking methods, provides a more intuitive and direct quantification of the contribution of sources reaching various sinks. The unit-concentration approach can be applied readily with existing solute transport software for a range of analyses including source allocation, well capture analysis, and mixing/dilution calculations. This paper presents the theory, method, and example applications of the unit-concentration approach for source quantification.
Full article: https://ngwa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gwat.13333