Analysis of groundwater age and flow fractions for source-sink assessments

ABSTRACT

Capture zone analysis has been a prominent aspect in managing water supply wells. The study of aquifer vulnerability and protection also employs groundwater age modeling. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of capture zones and groundwater age was used to propose a new method to understand the age fractions of water reaching pumping wells. The concept was derived from a volume-weighted approach for finding the mean age of a multi-component groundwater mixture. Numerical analysis of groundwater flow, age transport, and capture zone delineation was carried out to obtain volume-weighted mean groundwater age at the well. Thus, the groundwater age reaching a pumping well was easily assessed by computing age fractions. An additional recharge well rendered the groundwater age 25 days younger than that with a pumping well alone at 450 days. The example application described how the results could estimate the mean groundwater age at the sink point, contributed from the various sources.

KEYWORDS:

• Capture zones
• capture fractions
• age transport
• pumping well

Acknowledgments

The manuscript does not have any external contributors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors