Optimal Grondwater Monitoring Network Design for Pollution Plume Estimation with Active Sources

A new methodology has been developed to design optimal monitoring network to estimate the transient pollution plume resulting from active pollution sources in a contaminated aquifer. An optimization algorithm is linked with geostatistical kriging model as well as a numerical simulation model. Simulated annealing is used as the optimization tool. The physical process in the aquifer, i.e., the flow and contaminant transport processes are numerically simulated using numerical groundwater flow and transport simulation models. The spatial extrapolation of measured and simulated concentration is performed by using geostatistical estimation based on Kriging. The objective is to minimize the mass estimation error. The developed methodology is evaluated for an illustrative study area.