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SPECIAL SECTION: UNCERTAINTY IN VADOSE ZONE FLOW AND TRANSPORT PROPERTIES

A Solute Flux Approach to Transport through Bounded, Unsaturated Heterogeneous Porous Media

^a Center for Nuclear Waste and Regulatory Analyses, Southwest Research Institute, 6220 Culebra Road, San Antonio, TX 78238
^b EES-6, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545
^* Corresponding author (asun{at}cnwra.swri.edu).

Received 16 April 2003.

In this paper, we present a solute flux approach for analyzing solute transport statistics in statistically nonstationary, unsaturated flow. Flow nonstationarity in the vadose zone may arise from a number of factors. It is useful to develop a systematic approach that incorporates these factors into an uncertainty analysis. We first derive the general forms for solute flux moments. The solute flux moments are associated with one- and two-particle joint probability distribution functions (JPDF). We illustrate our results for certain forms of one-particle and two-particle JPDFs, in which the particle travel time is assumed to be lognormally distributed and the particle transverse displacement normally distributed. In the numerical examples, the Eulerian velocity moments is obtained by solving the head moment equations numerically using a finite-difference method. Our results show that flow nonstationarity has a significant impact on the statistics of solute fluxes and solute breakthrough curves.

Abbreviations: CP, control plane • JPDF, joint probability distribution function • PDF, probability distribution function

This article has been cited by other articles:

				R. M. Holt and M. J. Nicholl Uncertainty in Vadose Zone Flow and Transport Prediction Vadose Zone J., May 1, 2004; 3(2): 480 - 484. [Full Text] [PDF]