Flowing Well—Time‐Domain Solution and Inverse Problem Revisited

Abstract

Time-domain analytical solution for groundwater flow to a fully penetrating flowing well is derived using the same substitution technique used to re-derive (Perina 2010) the Theis (1935) equation and the approximate solution by Mishra and Guyonnet (1992) is confirmed. The exponential integral-based flowing well function is a computationally effective alternative to the original Jacob and Lohman (1952) solution in integral form. For a constant drawdown test, the ratio of drawdown at an observation well to the flowrate is equivalent to drawdown response to pumping at unit constant rate; the transformed observations can be analyzed using the Theis (1935) function. Analysis of field test shows that simultaneous fitting to measurements of flow from the test well and drawdown at an observation well results in more accurate and better resolved estimates of aquifer properties than fitting to flow observations only.