Identification of pollution source intensity pattern in aquifer-river interactive system using concentration data in river downstream

Rivers and Aquifers are components of the hydrological cycle that mutually affect each other. The detection of pollution sources in water environments is an important but a very difficult task. For this purpose, inverse optimization technique can be used. In this paper, a simulation-optimization approach is applied for identification of pollution source intensity pattern in an aquifer-river interactive system. For showing flexibility and applicability of the model two hypothetical scenarios are considered with different source mass loading. In the first scenario it is assumed that start time of the source activity is known. In the second scenario source mass loading is applied with 180 days phase shift. NAEE (normalized absolute error of estimation %) is used in examining the accuracy of model estimation of source fluxes. They were 9.15 % and 19.1% in the first scenario and 6.75 % and 18.53 % in the second one considering with and without error observation concentration data, respectively. The results show that the presented model can identify source release fluxes with good accuracy.

Keywords:

Inverse Problem , Simulation – optimization approach , Integrated Aquifer- River systems , Pollution source