A multi-quadric area-sink for analytic element modeling of groundwater flow

It is shown that the approach presented by Strack (Strack, O.D.L., 1989. Groundwater Mechanics. Prentice Hall, New Jersey) for determining the discharge potential for an area-sink leads to a function that is unique except for an arbitrary constant. The approach is applied to a special area-sink, namely one with an extraction rate that varies inside a polygon as a multi-quadric interpolator (Hardy, R.L., 1971. Multiquadric equations of topography and other irregular surfaces. Journal of Geophysical Research 76, 1905-1915). The principle of over-specification presented by Jankovic and Barnes (Jankovic, I., Barnes, R., 1999a. Three-dimensional flow through large numbers of spheroidal inhomogeneities. Journal of Hydrology 226, 224-233), is used to obtain an approximate solution. Several examples are presented herewith. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.