PROBABILITY OF PLUME INTERCEPTION USING CONDITIONAL SIMULATION OF HYDRAULIC-HEAD AND INVERSE MODELING

A procedure to estimate the probability of intercepting a contaminant groundwater plume for monitoring network design has been developed and demonstrated. The objective of the procedure is to use all available information in a method that accounts for the heterogeneity of the aquifer and the paucity of data. The major components of the procedure are geostatistical conditional simulation and parameter estimation that are used sequentially to generate flow paths from a suspected contaminant source location to a designated monitoring transect. From the flow paths, a histogram is constructed that represents the spatial probability distribution of plume centerlines. With an independent estimate of the plume width, a relationship between the total cost and the probability of detecting a plume can be made. The method uses geostatistical information from hydraulic head measurements and is conditioned by the data and the physics of groundwater flow. This procedure was developed specifically for the design of monitoring systems at sites where very few, if any, hydraulic conductivity data are available.