Estimation of Conservative Contaminant Travel Time through Vadose Zone Based on Transient and Steady Flow Approaches - Publication - Bridge of Knowledge

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Estimation of Conservative Contaminant Travel Time through Vadose Zone Based on Transient and Steady Flow Approaches

Abstract

Estimation of contaminant travel time through the vadose zone is needed for assessing groundwater vulnerability to pollution, planning monitoring and remediation activities or predicting the effect of land use change or climate change on groundwater quality. The travel time can be obtained from numerical simulations of transient flow and transport in the unsaturated soil profile, which typically require a large amount of data and considerable computational effort. Alternatively, one can use simpler analytical methods based on the assumptions of steady water flow and purely advective transport. In this study, we compared travel times obtained with transient and steady-state approaches for several scenarios. Transient simulations were carried out using the HYDRUS-1D computer program for two types of homogeneous soil profiles (sand and clay loam), two types of land cover (bare soil and grass) and two values of dispersion constant. It was shown that the presence of root zone and the dispersion constant significantly affect the results. We also computed the travel times using six simplified methods proposed in the literature. None of these methods was in good agreement with transient simulations for all scenarios and the discrepancies were particularly large for the case of clay loam with grass cover.

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Category:
Articles
Type:
artykuł w czasopiśmie wyróżnionym w JCR
Published in:
Water no. 10, edition 10, pages 1 - 11,
ISSN: 2073-4441
Language:
English
Publication year:
2018
Bibliographic description:
Szymkiewicz A., Gumuła-Kawęcka A., Potrykus D., Jaworska-Szulc B., Pruszkowska-Caceres M., Gorczewska-Langner W.: Estimation of Conservative Contaminant Travel Time through Vadose Zone Based on Transient and Steady Flow Approaches// Water. -Vol. 10, iss. 10 (2018), s.1-11
DOI:
Digital Object Identifier (open in new tab) 10.3390/w10101417
Verified by:
Gdańsk University of Technology

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