[1] The Eulerian-Lagrangian localized adjoint method (ELLAM) formulation of Younes et al. (2006) is applied to solve the advection-dispersion equation used to describe conservative solute transport in highly heterogeneous porous media. Heterogeneity is described by a correlated random field with an exponential covariance. Macrodispersion coefficients are calculated for a broad range of heterogeneities using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations on large size domains. ELLAM circumvents some drawbacks of usual particletracking and Eulerian-Lagrangian methods when local dispersion/diffusion is added. ELLAM is also highly efficient and well adapted for advective dominant transport and for MC simulations. For pure advection, first-order approximation provides good estimates of the duration of the preasymptotic regime and of the longitudinal macrodispersion coefficient for a variance of the log conductivity 2 2:25. Higher-order theories overestimated this coefficient for higher variances. Computed transverse macrodispersion is equal to 0 for each studied variance of log conductivity 2 2 ½0:25; 1:0; 2:25; 4:0; 6:25; 9:0. Local dispersion/diffusion affects the macrodispersion for quite low Peclet number (<100) compared to previous work. For a Peclet number of 10, it leads to an increase of the longitudinal and transverse macrodispersion for low variances ( 2 ¼ 0:25). For higher heterogeneity ( 2 ¼ 9:0 for local dispersion and 2 ! 4:0 for local diffusion), the longitudinal macrodispersion decreases due to local transverse mixing.Citation: Ramasomanana F., A. Younes, and P. Ackerer (2013), Estimation of macrodispersion in 2-D highly heterogeneous porous media using the Eulerian-Lagrangian localized adjoint method, Water Resour. Res., 49,