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A practical three-dimensional estimation technique for spatial distribution of groundwater contaminant concentrations. (English) Zbl 1056.86005

Summary: To predict the fate of groundwater contaminants, accurate spatially continuous information is needed. Because most field samplings of groundwater contaminants are not conducted in a spatially continuous manner, a special estimation technique is required to interpolate/extrapolate concentration distributions at unmeasured locations. A practical three-dimensional estimation method for in situ groundwater contaminant concentrations is introduced. It consists of two general steps: estimation of the macroscopic transport process and kriging. Using field data and nonlinear optimization techniques, the macroscopic behavior of the contaminant plume is estimated. A spatial distribution of residuals is obtained by subtracting the macroscopic transport portion from field data; then kriging is applied to estimate residuals at unsampled locations. To reduce outlier effects on obtaining correlations between residual data which are needed for determining variogram models, the \({\mathcal R}_p\)-estimator is introduced. The proposed estimation method is applied to a field data set.

MSC:

86A32 Geostatistics
65C50 Other computational problems in probability (MSC2010)
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