Application of Similar Media Scaling and Conditional Simulation for Modeling Water Flow and Tritium Transport at the Las Cruces Trench Site

Abstract

Similar media scaling and geostatistical analyses are used to characterize the spatial variability of soil hydraulic properties at the Las Cruces Trench Site in New Mexico. A simple method is described for conditioning the hydraulic properties used for unsaturated water flow and solute transport modeling, based on the spatial distributions of initial field‐measured water contents and a set of scale‐mean hydraulic parameters determined from the scaling analysis. This method is used to estimate hydraulic properties for numerical simulations of the latest field‐scale flow and transport experiment conducted at the Las Cruces Trench Site. Relatively good matches between the observed and simulated flow and transport behavior are obtained without model calibration. The results of this study suggest that using similar media scaling in conjunction with the described conditioning procedure can significantly reduce the uncertainty in predictions of water flow and solute transport in spatially variable soils.