APPLICATION OF SIMILAR MEDIA SCALING AND CONDITIONAL SIMULATION FOR MODELING WATER-FLOW AND TRITIUM TRANSPORT AT THE LAS-CRUCES TRENCH SITE

Similar media scaling and geostatistical analyses are used to characte rize the spatial variability of soil hydraulic properties at the Las C ruces Trench Site in New Mexico. A simple method is described for cond itioning the hydraulic properties used for unsaturated water flow and solute transport modeling, based on the spatial distributions of initi al field-measured water contents and a set of scale-mean hydraulic par ameters determined from the scaling analysis. This method is used to e stimate hydraulic properties for numerical simulations of the latest f ield-scale flow and transport experiment conducted at the Las Cruces T rench Site. Relatively good matches between the observed and simulated flow and transport behavior are obtained without model calibration. T he results of this study suggest that using similar media scaling in c onjunction with the described conditioning procedure can significantly reduce the uncertainty in predictions of water flow and solute transp ort in spatially variable soils.