Three Strategies for Modeling & Visualizing Groundwater Contamination

Geological modeling strategies are like snowflakes - no two are identical. Although this provides a level of job security, it also means that care must be taken to use the proper strategy based on the geological framework. To illustrate this point, this paper provides three different strategies and associated case-studies for modeling and visualizing groundwater contamination. The first example involves a case-study in which historical well data was used to create annual models of a plume migrating through glacial outwash over a 34-year period. The second example involves contamination migrating through an epikarst environment into fractured carbonates sampled quarterly over a one-year period. The third example involves a single "snapshot" of a contaminant within a flood deposit. From the onset of each project, it was recognized that automation was the key to completion and to processing future data in a timely fashion (i.e., not reinventing the wheel when new data becomes available).