Revisiting the horizontal redistribution of water in soils: Experiments and numerical modeling.

A series of experiments and related numerical simulations were carried out to study one-dimensional water redistribution processes in an unsaturated soil. A long horizontal Plexiglas box was packed as homogenously as possible with sand. The sandbox was divided into two sections using a very thin metal plate, with one section initially fully saturated and the other section only partially saturated. Initial saturation in the dry section was set to 0.2, 0.4, or 0.6 in three different experiments. Redistribution between the wet and dry sections started as soon as the metal plate was removed. Changes in water saturation at various locations along the sandbox were measured as a function of time using a dual-energy gamma system. Also, air and water pressures were measured using two different kinds of tensiometers at various locations as a function of time. The saturation discontinuity was found to persist during the entire experiments, while observed water pressures were found to become continuous immediately after the experiments started. Two models, the standard Richards equation and an interfacial area model, were used to simulate the experiments. Both models showed some deviations between the simulated water pressures and the measured data at early times during redistribution. The standard model could only simulate the observed saturation distributions reasonably well for the experiment with the lowest initial water saturation in the dry section. The interfacial area model could reproduce observed saturation distributions of all three experiments, albeit by fitting one of the parameters in the surface area production term.

Optimizing landfill site selection by using land classification maps.

Municipal solid waste disposal is a major environmental concern throughout the world. Proper landfill siting involves many environmental, economic, technical, and sociocultural challenges. In this study, a new quantitative method for landfill siting that reduces the number of evaluation criteria, simplifies siting procedures, and enhances the utility of available land evaluation maps was proposed. The method is demonstrated by selecting a suitable landfill site near the city of Marvdasht in Iran. The approach involves two separate stages. First, necessary criteria for preliminary landfill siting using four constraints and eight factors were obtained from a land classification map initially prepared for irrigation purposes. Thereafter, the criteria were standardized using a rating approach and then weighted to obtain a suitability map for landfill siting, with ratings in a 0-1 domain and divided into five suitability classes. Results were almost identical to those obtained with a more traditional environmental landfill siting approach. Because of far fewer evaluation criteria, the proposed weighting method was much easier to implement while producing a more convincing database for landfill siting. The classification map also considered land productivity. In the second stage, the six best alternative sites were evaluated for final landfill siting using four additional criteria. Sensitivity analyses were furthermore conducted to assess the stability of the obtained ranking. Results indicate that the method provides a precise siting procedure that should convince all pertinent stakeholders.

The effects of preferential flow and soil texture on risk assessments of a NORM waste disposal site.

This paper investigates the environmental fate of radionuclide decay chains (specially the (238)U and (232)Th series) being released from a conventional mining installation processing ore containing natural occurring radioactive materials (NORMs). Contaminated waste at the site is being disposed off in an industrial landfill on top of a base of earth material to ensure integrity of the deposit over relatively long geologic times (thousands of years). Brazilian regulations, like those of many other countries, require a performance assessment of the disposal facility using a leaching and off-site transport scenario. We used for this purpose the HYDRUS-1D software package to predict long-term radionuclide transport vertically through both the landfill and the underlying unsaturated zone, and then laterally in groundwater. We assumed that a downgradient well intercepting groundwater was the only source of water for a resident farmer, and that all contaminated water from the well was somehow used in the biosphere. The risk assessment was carried out for both a best-case scenario assuming equilibrium transport in a fine-textured (clay) subsurface, and a worst-case scenario involving preferential flow through a more coarse-textured subsurface. Results show that preferential flow and soil texture both can have a major effect on the results, depending upon the specific radionuclide involved.

Operator-splitting errors in coupled reactive transport codes for transient variably saturated flow and contaminant transport in layered soil profiles.

One possible way of integrating subsurface flow and transport processes with (bio)geochemical reactions is to couple by means of an operator-splitting approach two completely separate codes, one for variably-saturated flow and solute transport and one for equilibrium and kinetic biogeochemical reactions. This paper evaluates the accuracy of the operator-splitting approach for multicomponent systems for typical soil environmental problems involving transient atmospheric boundary conditions (precipitation, evapotranspiration) and layered soil profiles. The recently developed HP1 code was used to solve the coupled transport and chemical equations. For steady-state flow conditions, the accuracy was found to be mainly a function of the adopted spatial discretization and to a lesser extent of the temporal discretization. For transient flow situations, the accuracy depended in a complex manner on grid discretization, time stepping and the main flow conditions (infiltration versus evaporation). Whereas a finer grid size reduced the numerical errors during steady-state flow or the main infiltration periods, the errors sometimes slightly increased (generally less than 50%) when a finer grid size was used during periods with a high evapotranspiration demand (leading to high pressure head gradients near the soil surface). This indicates that operator-splitting errors are most significant during periods with high evaporative boundary conditions. The operator-splitting errors could be decreased by constraining the time step using the performance index (the product of the grid Peclet and Courant numbers) during infiltration, or the maximum time step during evapotranspiration. Several test problems were used to provide guidance for optimal spatial and temporal discretization.

Fluid flow and solute migration within the capillary fringe.

Laboratory experiments involving both homogeneous and heterogeneous porous media are used to demonstrate that fluid flow and solute transport will occur regularly in the capillary fringe (CF), including both vertical (upward as well as downward) and horizontal flow velocities. Horizontal flow above the water table appears to be limited primarily to the region of high water saturation (i.e., the CF), an observation supported by numerical modeling and consistent with the literature. Beyond observations presented in prior literature, it was observed that exchange of water within the CF with water below the water table is active, with flux both from the CF downward across the water table and from the region below the water table, upward into the CF. This flux is enhanced by the presence of physical heterogeneity. These findings strongly contrast the common conceptualization of predominantly downward vertical fluid flow through the unsaturated zone, with transition to fully three-dimensional flow only below the water table. Based on these observations, it is suggested that the CF may affect, far more significantly than is usually assumed, the natural geochemical and microbial conditions present in the region of transition from unsaturated to saturated ground water flow.