ABSTRACT
The flow of water and the resulting transport of contaminants through unsaturated fractured media is a serious concern at many existing and potential waste disposal sites. Techniques for characterizing fractured media in the unsaturated zone are less established than techniques applied in saturated fractured rock or in unconsolidated media. This is due, in part, to difficulties associated with developing predictive models and devising monitoring methods suitable for characterizing contaminant migration in such media. The unique features of unsaturated fractured rock, such as the paucity of field data and the inability to identify networks of interconnected fractures over large distances, pose special problems when sampling for physical and chemical properties.
