Alzraiee, A.H., Bailey, R. and Bau, D. orcid.org/0000-0002-0730-5478 (2017) Assimilation of Historical Head Data to Estimate Spatial Distributions of Stream Bed and Aquifer Hydraulic Conductivity Fields. Hydrological Processes, 31 (7). pp. 1527-1538. ISSN 0885-6087
Abstract
Management of water resources in alluvial aquifers relies mainly on understanding interactions between hydraulically connected streams and aquifers. Numerical models that simulate this interaction often are used as decision support tools in water resource management. However, the accuracy of numerical predictions relies heavily on the unknown system parameters (i.e. stream bed conductivity and aquifer hydraulic conductivity) which are spatially heterogeneous and difficult to measure directly. This paper employs an Ensemble Smoother to invert groundwater level measurements to jointly estimate spatially-varying streambed and alluvial aquifer hydraulic conductivity along a 35.6 km segment of the South Platte River in northeastern Colorado. The accuracy of the inversion procedure is evaluated using a synthetic experiment and historical groundwater level measurements, with the latter constituting the novelty of this study in the inversion and validation of high resolution fields of streambed and aquifer conductivities. Results show that the estimated streambed conductivity field and aquifer conductivity field produce an acceptable agreement between observed and simulated groundwater levels and stream flow rates. The estimated parameter fields are also used to simulate the spatially varying flow exchange between the alluvial aquifer and the stream, which exhibit high spatial variability along the river reach with a maximum average monthly aquifer gain of about 2.3 m3/day and a maximum average monthly aquifer loss of 2.8 m3/day, per unit area of streambed (m2). These results demonstrate that data assimilation inversion provides a reliable and computationally affordable tool to estimate the spatial variability of streambed and aquifer conductivities at high resolution in real-world systems.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 Wiley. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Hydrological Processes. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Civil and Structural Engineering (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 04 Apr 2017 13:55 |
Last Modified: | 10 Jan 2018 01:38 |
Published Version: | http://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.11123 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/hyp.11123 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:113999 |