A Review of Stochastic Analysis for Solute Transport at Regional Scale

Solute transport in heterogeneous formation has been studied with increasing intensity in the past few decades as a result of growing concern about groundwater quality and pollution.The basic theory,methods,and some results are discussed and summarized in this paper.It is widely recognized that the variability of conductivity is the controlling factor for solute transprot at field scale.This paper summarizes some results of the variability of formation and soil hydraulic properties from field experiments.It is shown that the variance of log-transformed hydraulic conductivity is closed to 1 and the correlation length increases with the measurement scale.By considering the hydraulic properties as random fields,Lagrangian and Eulerian methods were used to study solute transport in regional scale.The mean concentration satisfies convection-dispersion equation with macor-scale parameters.The paper also shows some results of concentration variance which is used as a measure of the adequacy of the mean concentration.The results em phasize the key role of variance and correlation length of log-transformed conductivity field.Based on this review,we point out some further research fields.