Characterization of Field-Scale Solute Transport in Spatially Variable Unsaturated Field Soils
Authors: Jury William A. , Russo David 
Published: December 2021

This report describes activity conducted in several lines of research associated with field-scale water and solute processes. A major effort was put forth developing a stochastic continuum analysis for an important class of problems involving flow of reactive and non reactive chemicals under steady unsaturated flow. The field-scale velocity covariance tensor has been derived from local soil properties and their variability, producing a large-scale description of the medium that embodies all of the local variability in a statistical sense. Special cases of anisotropic medium properties not aligned along the flow direction of spatially variable solute sorption were analysed in detail, revealing a dependence of solute spreading on subtle features of the variability of the medium, such as cross-correlations between sorption and conductivity. A novel method was developed and tested for measuring hydraulic conductivity at the scale of observation through the interpretation of a solute transport outflow curve as a stochastic-convective process. This undertaking provided a host of new K(q) relationships for existing solute experiments and also laid the foundation for future work developing a self-consistent description of flow and transport under these conditions. Numerical codes were developed for calculating K(q) functions for a variety of solute pulse outflow shapes, including lognormal, Fickian, Mobile-Immobile water, and bimodal. Testing of this new approach against conventional methodology was mixed, and agreed most closely when the assumptions of the new method were met. We conclude that this procedure offers a valuable alternative to conventional methods of measuring K(q), particularly when the application of the method is at a scale (e.g. and agricultural field) that is large compared to the common scale at which conventional K(q) devices operate. The same problem was approached from a numerical perspective, by studying the feasibility of inverting a solute outflow signal to yield the hydraulic parameters of the medium that housed the experiment. We found that the inverse problem was solvable under certain conditions, depending on the amount of noise in the signal and the degree of heterogeneity in the medium. A realistic three dimensional model of transient water and solute movement in a heterogeneous medium that contains plant roots was developed and tested. The approach taken was to generate a single realization of this complex flow event, and examine the results to see whether features were present that might be overlooked in less sophisticated model efforts. One such feature revealed is transverse dispersion, which is a critically important component in the development of macrodispersion in the longitudinal direction. The lateral mixing that was observed greatly exceeded that predicted from simpler approaches, suggesting that at least part of the important physics of the mixing process is embedded in the complexity of three dimensional flow. Another important finding was the observation that variability can produce a pseudo-kinetic behavior for solute adsorption, even when the local models used are equilibrium.