A Review of Field-Scale Physical Solute Transport Processes in Saturated and Unsaturated Porous Media

摘要

The development of accurate mathematical models to predict field-scale solute transport in the saturated and unsaturated zones is hampered by the lack of reliable data on field-scale transport parameters. A critical review of the available literature on studies conducted at 55 saturated zone and 28 unsaturated zone sites produced 99 and 8 longitudinal dispersivity values, respectively.nIn the saturated zone, the scale of observation for all the data ranged from 0.75 m to 100 km with longitudinal dispersivities from 0.01 to 5500 m. However, only five sites produced highly reliable dispersivity data, based on an evaluation of the test configuration, the tracer monitoring, and the data analysis method for each site. The largest scale of high reliability dispersivities was only 115 m. The high reliability data subset indicates that the dispersivity initially increases with the scale of observation.