STOCHASTIC SIMULATION OF TRANSMISSIVITY FIELDS CONDITIONAL TO BOTH TRANSMISSIVITY AND PIEZOMETRIC HEAD DATA - 3 - APPLICATION TO THE CULEBRA FORMATION AT THE WASTE ISOLATION PILOT PLAN (WIPP), NEW-MEXICO, USA

The self-calibrated approach is applied to the stochastic analysis of groundwater flow and advective mass transport in the WIPP site. Multip le equally likely realizations of logtransmissivity fields are generat ed, followed by the solution of variable density groundwater flow and particle tracking. Five different cases have been analyzed. The first one regards the modeling of variable-density groundwater flow and the remaining four regard the generation of the logtransmissivity fields. Results show that (i) it is important to model variable-density flow a s accurately as possible, (ii) conditioning to piezometric head data h elps in reducing the uncertainty in flow and transport predictions, (i ii) accounting for uncertainty in boundary conditions helps improving the match to measured heads, and (iv) the interpreted value at locatio n P-18 is not consistent with the model of spatial variability inferre d from the data. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.