Laboratory Validation of an Integrated Surface Water— Groundwater Model

Abstract

The hydrodynamic surface water model DIVAST has been extended to include horizontally adjacent groundwater flows. This extended model is known as DIVAST-SG (Depth Integrated Velocities and Solute Transport with Surface Water and Groundwater). After development and analytical verification the model was tested against a novel laboratory set-up using open cell foam (60 pores per inch—ppi) as an idealised porous media representing a riverbank. The Hyder Hy- draulics Laboratory at Cardiff University has a large tidal basin that was adapted to simulate a surface water—ground- water scenario using this foam, and used to validate the DIVAST-SG model. The properties of the laboratory set-up were measured and values were determined for hydraulic conductivity (permeability) and porosity, evaluated as 0.002 m/s and 75% respectively. Lessons learnt in this initial experimentation were used to modify the flume construction and improve the experimental procedure, with further experimentation being undertaken of both water level variations and tracer movement. Valuable data have been obtained from the laboratory experiments, allowing the validity of the nu- merical model to be assessed. Modifications to the input file to include representations of the joints between the foam blocks allowed a good fit between the observed and modelled water levels. Encouraging correlation was observed in tracer experiments using Rhodamine-WT dye between the observed exit points of the tracer from the foam, and the modelled exit points with time. Keywords: