Mb. Lahkim et La. Garcia, Stochastic modeling of exposure and risk in a contaminated heterogeneous aquifer. 1. Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis, ENV ENG SCI, 16(5), 1999, pp. 315-328
Citations number
42
Categorie Soggetti
Environment/Ecology,"Environmental Engineering & Energy
This paper describes a stochastic methodology for modeling contaminant tran
sport to determine the risk of potential human exposure to toxic chemicals
in a heterogenous contaminated aquifer, The Sequential Gaussian Simulation
(SGS) method is used to generate random hydraulic conductivity fields. Stat
istical sampling of hydraulic conductivity fields is based on Monte Carlo s
imple random sampling, An optimum number of Monte Carlo runs is calculated
for a single uncertain groundwater parameter, hydraulic conductivity, using
several approaches. The magnitude of human exposure via the ingestion of c
ontaminated groundwater from a well is calculated considering the probabili
stic distribution of the hydraulic conductivity results derived from a nume
rically modeled contaminant concentration profile. This research shows that
in exposure assessment, choosing the appropriate number of Monte Carlo sim
ulations can be very critical. The number of simulations should be well jus
tified and should guarantee convergence toward a stable statistical distrib
ution of the output.