Discrete stability of the Differential System Method evaluated with geostatistical techniques

Abstract

The Differential System Method (DSM) permits identi®cation of the physical parameters of ®nite-difference groundwater¯ow models in a con®ned aquifer when piezometric head and source terms are known at each point of the ®nite-difference lattice for at least two independent¯ow situations for which the hydraulic gradients are not parallel. Since piezometric head data are usually few and sparse, interpolation of the measured data onto a regular grid can be performed with geostatistical techniques. We apply kriging to the sparse data of a synthetic aquifer to evaluate the stability of the DSM with respect to uncorrelated measurement errors and interpolation errors. The numerical results show that the DSM is stable.

Identification of Aquifer Transmissivity with Multiple Sets of Data Using the Differential System Method

“…The DSM has been tested with stationary [5] and transient [17] synthetic data. A discussion on the discrete stability of the method is given in [5] and numerical experiments are shown in [6].…”