Quantifying the Value of Groundwater Monitoring Along the Eastern Shore, Virginia

摘要

Numerical groundwater models are approximations of the real system in part due to incomplete lithology data and limited historical head and concentration observations. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VaDEQ) uses the three-dimensional variable density groundwater model, SEAWAT, as a regional groundwater modeling tool to evaluate the impacts of groundwater withdrawals on the water resource throughout the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Since the Eastern Shore's sole source of water is found in aquifers, the management of this resource is imperative to sustainable development. The VaDEQ acknowledges a need to quantify where additional observation data would improve the Eastern Shore SEAWAT model accuracy in an effort to better manage this resource. In order to improve model accuracy and reliability, it is important, due to time and financial limitations, to collect and analyze data which is most essential to modeling objectives. This study builds off previous model development and calibration work presented in Sanford et al. (2009) and develops a new method to determine the relative importance of additional locations for groundwater monitoring. Four locations for nested well installations near large groundwater withdrawals have been identified to improve the models ability to better predict aquifer heads and chloride concentrations.