Multicompartment and multiscale long‐term observation and research are important prerequisites to tackling the scientific challenges resulting from climate and global change. Long‐term monitoring programs are cost intensive and require high analytical standards, however, and the gain of knowledge often requires longer observation times. Nevertheless, several environmental research networks have been established in recent years, focusing on the impact of climate and land use change on terrestrial ecosystems. From 2008 onward, a network of Terrestrial Environmental Observatories (TERENO) has been established in Germany as an interdisciplinary research program that aims to observe and explore the long‐term ecological, social, and economic impacts of global change at the regional level. State‐of‐the‐art methods from the field of environmental monitoring, geophysics, and remote sensing will be used to record and analyze states and fluxes for different environmental compartments from groundwater through the vadose zone, surface water, and biosphere, up to the lower atmosphere.

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[1] This paper is intended to provide insight into the controlling mechanisms of karst genesis based on an advanced modeling approach covering the characteristic hydraulics in karst systems, the dissolution kinetics, and the associated temporal decrease in flow resistance. Karst water hydraulics is strongly governed by the interaction between a highly conductive low storage conduit network and a low-conductive high-storage rock matrix under variable boundary conditions. Only if this coupling of flow mechanisms is considered can an appropriate representation of other relevant processes be achieved, e.g., carbonate dissolution, transport of dissolved solids, and limited groundwater recharge. Here a parameter study performed with the numerical model Carbonate Aquifer Void Evolution (CAVE) is presented, which allows the simulation of the genesis of karst aquifers during geologic time periods. CAVE integrates several important features relevant for different scenarios of karst evolution: (1) the complex hydraulic interplay between flow in the karst conduits and in the small fissures of the rock matrix, (2) laminar as well as turbulent flow conditions, (3) time-dependent and nonuniform recharge to both flow systems, (4) the widening of the conduits accounting for appropriate physicochemical relationships governing calcite dissolution kinetics. This is achieved by predefining an initial network of karst conduits (''protoconduits'') which are allowed to grow according to the amount of aggressive water available due to hydraulic boundary conditions. The increase in conduit transmissivity is associated with an increase in conduit diameters while the conductivity of the fissured system is assumed to be constant in time. The importance of various parameters controlling karst genesis is demonstrated in a parameter study covering the recharge distribution, the upgradient boundary conditions for the conduit system, and the hydraulic coupling between the conduit network and the rock matrix. In particular, it is shown that conduit diameters increase in downgradient or upgradient direction depending on the spatial distribution (local versus uniform) of the recharge component which directly enters the conduit system.INDEX TERMS: 1829 Hydrology: Groundwater hydrology; 1894 Hydrology: Instruments and techniques; KEYWORDS: karst hydrology, aquifer evolution, groundwater flow, pipe flow, calcite dissolution kinetics, numerical modeling Citation: Liedl, R., M. Sauter, D. Hückinghaus, T. Clemens, and G. Teutsch, Simulation of the development of karst aquifers using a coupled continuum pipe flow model, Water Resour.

Spreading of conservative solutes in groundwater due to aquifer heterogeneity is quantified by the macrodispersivity, which was found to be scale dependent. It increases with travel distance, stabilizing eventually at a constant value. However, the question of its asymptotic behavior at very large scale is still a matter of debate. It was surmised in the literature that macrodispersivity scales up following a unique scaling law. Attempts to define such a law were made by fitting a regression line in the log‐log representation of an ensemble of macrodispersivities from multiple experiments. The functional relationships differ among the authors, based on the choice of data. Our study revisits the data basis, used for inferring unique scaling, through a detailed analysis of literature marcodispersivities. In addition, values were collected from the most recent tracer tests reported in the literature. We specified a system of criteria for reliability and reevaluated the reliability of the reported values. The final collection of reliable estimates of macrodispersivity does not support a unique scaling law relationship. On the contrary, our results indicate, that the field data can be explained as a collection of macrodispersivities of aquifers with varying degree of heterogeneity where each exhibits its own constant asymptotic value. Our investigation concludes that transport, and particularly the macrodispersivity, is formation‐specific, and that modeling of transport cannot be relegated to a unique scaling law. Instead, transport requires characterization of aquifer properties, e.g., spatial distribution of hydraulic conductivity, and the use of adequate models.

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