Identification of contaminant source characteristics and monitoring network design in groundwater aquifers: an overview

Amirabdollahian, Mahsa, and Datta, Bithin (2013) Identification of contaminant source characteristics and monitoring network design in groundwater aquifers: an overview. Journal of Environmental Protection, 4 (5A). pp. 26-41.

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Abstract

The groundwater system is often polluted by different sources of contamination where the sources are difficult to detect. The presence of contamination in groundwater poses significant challenges to its delineation and quantification. The remediation of a contaminated site requires an optimal decision making system to identify the pollutant source characteristics accurately and efficiently. The source characteristics are generally identified using contaminant concentration measurements from arbitrary or planned monitoring locations. To effectively characterize the sources of pollution, the monitoring locations should be selected appropriately. An efficient monitoring network will result in satisfactory characterization of contaminant sources. On the other hand, an appropriate design of monitoring network requires reliable source characteristics. A coupled iterative sequential source identification and dynamic monitoring network design, improves substantially the accuracy of source identification model. This paper reviews different source identification and monitoring network design methods in groundwater contaminant sites. Further, the models for sequential integration of these two models are presented. The effective integration of source identification and dedicated monitoring network design models, distributed sources, parameter uncertainty, and pollutant geo-chemistry are some of the issues which need to be addressed in efficient, accurate and widely applicable methodologies for identification of unknown pollutant sources in contaminated aquifers.

Item ID: 32192
Item Type: Article (Scholarly Work)
ISSN: 2152-2219
Keywords: pollution detection, aquifer contamination, groundwater, source identification, monitoring network design
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© 2013 Mahsa Amirabdollahian, Bithin Datta. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Funders: Cooperative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of Environment
Date Deposited: 30 Apr 2014 00:23
FoR Codes: 09 ENGINEERING > 0905 Civil Engineering > 090509 Water Resources Engineering @ 50%
09 ENGINEERING > 0907 Environmental Engineering > 090799 Environmental Engineering not elsewhere classified @ 50%
SEO Codes: 96 ENVIRONMENT > 9609 Land and Water Management > 960999 Land and Water Management of Environments not elsewhere classified @ 100%
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