Investigation of a parameter estimation method for contaminant transport in aquifers

Real world groundwater aquifers are heterogeneous and system variables are not uniformly distributed across the aquifer. Therefore, in the modelling of the contaminant transport, we need to consider the uncertainty associated with the system. Unny presented a method to describe the system by stochastic differential equations and then to estimate the parameters by using the maximum likelihood approach. In this paper, this method was explored by using artificial and experimental data. First a set of data was used to explore the effect of system noise on estimated parameters. The experimental data was used to compare the estimated parameters with the calibrated results. Estimates obtained from artificial data show reasonable accuracy when the system noise is present. The accuracy of the estimates has an inverse relationship to the noise. Hydraulic conductivity estimates in a one-parameter situation give more accurate results than in a two-parameter situation. The effect of the noise on estimates of the longitudinal dispersion coefficient is less compared to the effect on hydraulic conductivity estimates. Comparison of the results of the experimental dataset shows that estimates of the longitudinal dispersion coefficient are similar to the aquifer calibrated results. However, hydraulic conductivity does not provide a similar level of accuracy. The main advantage of the estimation method presented here is its direct dependence on field observations in the presence of reasonably large noise levels.