ABSTRACT

Detailed aquifer properties are needed to predict the fate of groundwater solutes and to design efficient remediation strategies for contaminated aquifers, yet the hydrogeologic data used to estimate these properties are generally local and sparse. Low-resolution aquifer property estimates generally fail to describe the dominant flow and transport paths through an aquifer, resulting in significant errors in groundwater flow and solute transport predictions. One way to improve the resolution of heterogeneous aquifer properties involves combining densely sampled geophysical informationwith sparse hydrogeologic data in numerical inversions. This chapter provides: a synopsis of simulation-optimizationmethods; a description of surface

JACQ: “4316_c015” — 2006/10/12 — 13:34 — page 2 — #2

seismic, ground-penetrating radar (GPR), and cross-well seismic tomography methods; and a discussion of approaches to combine geophysical and hydrogeologic data with an emphasis on applications that have incorporated tracer test data.