Upscaling unsaturated hydraulic parameters for flow through heterogeneous anisotropic sediments

We compare two methods for determining the upscaled water characteristics and saturation-dependent anisotropy in unsaturated hydraulic conductivity from a field-scale injection test. In both approaches an effective medium approximation is used to reduce a porous medium of M textures to an equivalent homogenous medium. The first approach is a phenomenological approach based on homogenization and assumes that moisture-based Richards' equation can be treated like the convective-dispersive equation (CDE). The gravity term, dK(z)(theta)/d(theta), analogous to the vertical convective velocity in the CDE, is determined from the temporal evolution of the plume centroid along the vertical coordinate allowing calculation of an upscaled K-z(theta). As with the dispersion tensor in the CDE, the rate of change of the second spatial moment in 3D space is used to calculate the water diffusivity tensor, D(theta), from which an upscaled K(theta) is calculated. The second approach uses the combined parameter scale inverse technique (CPSIT). Parameter scaling is used first to reduce the number of parameters to be estimated by a factor M. Upscaled parameters are then optimized by inverse modeling to produce an upscaled K(theta) characterized by a pore tortuosity-connectivity tensor, L. Parameters for individual textures are finally determined from the optimized parameters by inverse scaling using scale factors determined a priori. Both methods produced upscaled K(theta) that showed evidence of saturation dependent anisotropy. Flow predictions with the STOMP simulator, parameterized with upscaled parameters, were compared with field observations. Predictions based on the homogenization method were able to capture the mean plume behavior but could not reproduce the asymmetry caused by heterogeneity and lateral spreading, The CPSIT method captured the effects of heterogeneity and anisotropy and reduced the mean squared residual by nearly 90% compared to local-scale and upscaled parameters from the homogenization method. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for the US Department of Energy by Battelle under Contract DE-AC05-76RL01830. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.