GEOSSAV: a simulation tool for subsurface applications

Well capture zone determination and site remediation has led to an increasing need of understanding how to quantitatively characterize both the heterogeneity of gravel aquifers and the influence of heterogeneity on groundwater flow and solute transport. Models play an important role in decision-making processes, especially in the context of better characterizing and in forecasting the behavior of a given coupled geological-hydrogeological system. An example from the Rhine/Wiese aquifer near Basel, Switzerland, demonstrates the application of GEOSSAV on geostatistical data analysis and subsurface simulations based on ground-penetrating radar (georadar or GPR) and borehole data. Subsequent groundwater modeling of a well capture zone leads to a plane representation of the probability of a certain surface location belonging to the well capture zone, caused by hydrologic variations, water supply operation, and the uncertainty of subsurface heterogeneity. The developed software GEOSSAV is a tool for the integration of hard and soft data in the stochastic simulation and visualization of distributions of geological structures and hydrogeological properties in the subsurface. It can also be used for other applications such as soil contamination, and ecology GEOSSAV has been successfully tested on Microsoft Windows NT 4.0/2000/XP and on SuSE Linux 7.3. The current version is available at http://www.unibas.ch/earth/pract.