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AGU: Water Resources Research

 

Keywords

  • data assimilation
  • ensemble Kalman filter
  • groundwater stochastic model
  • heterogeneity
  • high-resolution
  • upscaling

Index Terms

  • Computational Geophysics: Data analysis: algorithms and implementation
  • Computational Geophysics: Modeling (1952, 4255, 4316)
  • Hydrology: Groundwater hydrology
  • Hydrology: Stochastic hydrology

Abstract

WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH, VOL. 48, W01537, 19 PP., 2012
doi:10.1029/2010WR010214

Modeling transient groundwater flow by coupling ensemble Kalman filtering and upscaling

Key Points
  • EnKF is used to calibrate full tensor conductivities for the first time
  • Coupling EnKF and upscaling can deal with a large number of realizations
  • Coarse scale flow and transport predictions are as accurate as fine scale

Liangping Li

School of Water Resources and Environment, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China

Group of Hydrogeology, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

Haiyan Zhou

School of Water Resources and Environment, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China

Group of Hydrogeology, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen

Agrosphere, IBG-3, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich, Germany

J. Jaime Gómez-Hernández

Group of Hydrogeology, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is coupled with upscaling to build an aquifer model at a coarser scale than the scale at which the conditioning data (conductivity and piezometric head) had been taken for the purpose of inverse modeling. Building an aquifer model at the support scale of observations is most often impractical since this would imply numerical models with many millions of cells. If, in addition, an uncertainty analysis is required involving some kind of Monte Carlo approach, the task becomes impossible. For this reason, a methodology has been developed that will use the conductivity data at the scale at which they were collected to build a model at a (much) coarser scale suitable for the inverse modeling of groundwater flow and mass transport. It proceeds as follows: (1) Generate an ensemble of realizations of conductivities conditioned to the conductivity data at the same scale at which conductivities were collected. (2) Upscale each realization onto a coarse discretization; on these coarse realizations, conductivities will become tensorial in nature with arbitrary orientations of their principal components. (3) Apply the EnKF to the ensemble of coarse conductivity upscaled realizations in order to condition the realizations to the measured piezometric head data. The proposed approach addresses the problem of how to deal with tensorial parameters, at a coarse scale, in ensemble Kalman filtering while maintaining the conditioning to the fine-scale hydraulic conductivity measurements. We demonstrate our approach in the framework of a synthetic worth-of-data exercise, in which the relevance of conditioning to conductivities, piezometric heads, or both is analyzed.

Received 4 November 2010; accepted 5 December 2011; published 25 January 2012.

Citation: Li, L., H. Zhou, H.-J. Hendricks Franssen, and J. J. Gómez-Hernández (2012), Modeling transient groundwater flow by coupling ensemble Kalman filtering and upscaling, Water Resour. Res., 48, W01537, doi:10.1029/2010WR010214.

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