Hydrological simulation of flow in aquifers of high incertitude

E. Rozos, Hydrological simulation of flow in aquifers of high incertitude, PhD thesis, 250 pages, Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering – National Technical University of Athens, April 2010.

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[Greek]

The modern computational systems have enabled the simulation of hydrological processes with physically based models that offer satisfactory speed and friendly user interface. In the case of groundwater applications these models solve numerically, based on a dense discretization of the flow domain, the differential equation that describes the groundwater flow. However cases can be found where these models are not the best option. These cases are referred in this thesis with the term aquifers of high incertitude. The objective of this thesis is to suggest methods and to develop specialized models for these aquifers. The following techniques are original contributions of this thesis: a) a model with flexible discretization; b) the hydraulic analogous; c) the study of multi-cell models’ error; d) the mixed flow equation. These techniques were applied on one synthetic and six real aquifers. The application of the proposed mixed flow equation in the karstic aquifers of Lilaia, Bregava and Almyros Agiou Nikolaou revealed that the mixed flow equation is advantageous only in cases where reliable water level measurements are available. If there is no interest in simulating the fluctuation of the water level then the linear equation, i.e. the Darcy equation, is advantageous (simpler and faster). The Western Thessaly case study indicated the basic advantage of the multi cell models, which is the good accuracy even with limited number of discretization cells. In all case studies the holistic modelling of the water basin with conceptual but fully integrated hydrological models was more consistent than the modelling of the hydrological processes using sequential physically based models with dense discretization. This is because in the latter case the inputs that dynamically depend on the interaction between the hydrological subsystems are estimated whereas in the former case they are simulated.

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Other works that reference this work (this list might be obsolete):

1. Charizopoulos, N., and A. Psilovikos, Hydrologic processes simulation using the conceptual model Zygos: the example of Xynias drained Lake catchment (central Greece), Environmental Earth Sciences, doi:10.1007/s12665-016-5565-x, 2016.

Tagged under: Groundwater, Hydrological models