The Water Budget Myth and Its Recharge Controversy: Linear vs. Nonlinear Models.

The water budget myth, which is the idea that safe pumping must not exceed the initial recharge, gave rise to a controversy about the role of recharge in assessing the sustainability of groundwater development. To refute the concept of safe yield, a simplified water budget equation is used, which equals the total pumping rate to the sum of capture and storage change. Since initial recharge and discharge are canceled out from this equation, it is concluded that sustainable pumping has nothing to do with recharge. Investigating the assumptions underlying this equation, it is seen that it expresses the superposition principle, which implicitly assumes the groundwater reservoir can be depleted indefinitely and boundary conditions are an infinite source of water. To evaluate sustainability, however, the limits of the aquifer system must be examined accurately. Theoretically, this can only be accomplished applying nonlinear models, in which case setting up the simplified water budget equation is impossible without knowing the initial conditions. Hence, excluding recharge when assessing sustainable pumping may not be done inconsiderately, which is illustrated by two examples. An analytical solution, developed by Ernst in 1971 to simulate flow to a well in a polder area with a nonlinear function for drainage, even shows that it is not necessarily a misconception to assume the cone of depression stops expanding when the pumping rate is balanced by the infiltration rate.

SEAWAT-based simulation of axisymmetric heat transport.

Simulation of heat transport has its applications in geothermal exploitation of aquifers and the analysis of temperature dependent chemical reactions. Under homogeneous conditions and in the absence of a regional hydraulic gradient, groundwater flow and heat transport from or to a well exhibit radial symmetry, and governing equations are reduced by one dimension (1D) which increases computational efficiency importantly. Solute transport codes can simulate heat transport and input parameters may be modified such that the Cartesian geometry can handle radial flow. In this article, SEAWAT is evaluated as simulator for heat transport under radial flow conditions. The 1971, 1D analytical solution of Gelhar and Collins is used to compare axisymmetric transport with retardation (i.e., as a result of thermal equilibrium between fluid and solid) and a large diffusion (conduction). It is shown that an axisymmetric simulation compares well with a fully three dimensional (3D) simulation of an aquifer thermal energy storage systems. The influence of grid discretization, solver parameters, and advection solution is illustrated. Because of the high diffusion to simulate conduction, convergence criterion for heat transport must be set much smaller (10(-10) ) than for solute transport (10(-6) ). Grid discretization should be considered carefully, in particular the subdivision of the screen interval. On the other hand, different methods to calculate the pumping or injection rate distribution over different nodes of a multilayer well lead to small differences only.