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Comment On “Identifying Sources of Groundwater Pollution: An Optimization Approach” by Steven M. Gorelick, Barbara Evans, and Irwin Remson
Author(s) -
Woolhiser David A.
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1029/wr020i006p00743
Subject(s) - groundwater , groundwater pollution , pollution , environmental science , water resource management , environmental ethics , operations research , hydrology (agriculture) , engineering , philosophy , aquifer , geotechnical engineering , ecology , biology
The paper by Gorelick et al. [1983] on the identification of groundwater pollution sources most certainly addresses a significant contemporary hydrologic problem. The approach that they describe could find application in detection of inputs to surface water systems as well as in detection of sources of groundwater pollution. Indeed, approaches similar to their steady state conservative model have been used recently in slightly different contexts. Woolhiser et al. [1979, 1982] developed a technique to estimate multiple inflows to a stream reach based on a quadratic programming solution to find the unknown inflow quantities that minimized the sum of squares of normalized errors for up to eight ion balance equations, subject to a water balance constraint and a nonnegativity constraint. They used Monte Carlo techniques to investigate the sensitivity of the solution to errors in the chemical analyses and stream flow measurements. Chemical element balances (CEB's) have also been used to identify sources of particulates for many elements which can be associated with specific types of air pollution sources [Kowalczyk et al., 1982]. According to the CEB model, the composition of particles at a receptor is a linear combination of concentration patterns of particles from contributing sources. Kowalczyk et al. [1982] determined source strength coefficients by a least squares fit to the observed concentrations of several "marker elements." Tsurumi [1982] utilized the multiple ion balance approach to estimate not only the relative proportions of sources present in a mixture but also the ranges of chemical composition of the sources of chemical constituents. His method requires several mixtures of the source waters at different proportions and uses an iterative least squares solution. The source compositions are also subject to an anion-cation balance constraint.