Nonlinear Expression of Groundwater Head Interval Based on the Perturbation Method
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 26, Issue 8
Abstract
An investigation of a groundwater system often requires the prediction of the spatiotemporal distribution of groundwater heads, which determine the groundwater flow direction and magnitude, among other applications. How to quantify the uncertainty of groundwater flow has been an important issue of concern to hydrogeologists for more than , and many methods based on stochastic and statistical approaches have been proposed to resolve this issue, with considerable progress being made. However, the statistical characteristics of parameters (e.g., hydrogeological parameters, boundaries, and sources/sinks) are often difficult to obtain precisely in practical applications. From a perspective of the interval uncertainty of groundwater, this study proposes a nonlinear expression of the groundwater head interval (GHI) using an interval uncertainty approach to quantify the uncertainty of numerical simulations in groundwater flow. This study uses a steady-state groundwater flow example to analyze the computational effectiveness of the acquired expression of GHI. A comparison of the results with the equal interval continuous sampling method (EICSM) shows that when the changing rate (which is the ratio of the absolute change in the numerical value to the numerical value itself) of a hydrogeological parameter is no more than 0.2, the relative discrepancy of the obtained GHI in this study and EICSM is no more than 5%. When the changing rate is no more than 0.3, such a relative discrepancy can be controlled within approximately 10%. In general, the proposed method is computationally efficient and robust for quantifying GHI. Finally, the method of this study is applied successfully to a real case.
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Data Availability Statement
The groundwater flow model (GFModel) that supports the findings of this study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2019YFC1805400), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2020ZDPY0201), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41202179 and 51209109), and the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) Fund of Geosciences from the China University of Mining and Technology. We thank the editor, associate editor, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which help us greatly in revising and improving the quality of the manuscript.
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Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 26 • Issue 8 • August 2021
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© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Jun 19, 2020
Accepted: Feb 19, 2021
Published online: May 20, 2021
Published in print: Aug 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Oct 20, 2021
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