The Afghanistan population living far from rivers relies upon groundwater delivered from karezes (sub-horizontal tunnels). Karezes exploit unconfined groundwater in alluvial fans recharged largely by snowmelt from the Hindu Kush, the central mountain range of the country. Since the multi-year drought that began in 1998, many karezes have stopped flowing. This study characterizes the hydraulics ...

The goal of a hydraulic capture model for remediation purposes is to design a well field so that the direction of groundwater flow is altered, thereby halting or reversing the migration of a contaminant plume. Management strategies typically require a well design that will contain or shrink a plume at minimum cost. Objective functions and constraints can be nonlinear, non-convex, non-differenti...

[1] Hydraulic tomography, a procedure involving the performance of a suite of pumping tests in a tomographic format, provides information about variations in hydraulic conductivity at a level of detail not obtainable with traditional well tests. However, analysis of transient data from such a suite of pumping tests represents a substantial computational burden. Although steady state responses c...

Current theory presumes that natural selection on vascular traits is controlled by a trade-off between efficiency and safety of hydraulic architecture. Hence, traits linked to efficiency, such as vessel diameter, should show biogeographic patterns; but critical tests of these predictions are rare, largely owing to confounding effects of environment, tree size and phylogeny. Using wood sampled f...

Intermittent fluid pulses in the Earth’s crust can explain a variety of geological phenomena, for instance the occurrence of hydraulic breccia. Fluid transport in the crust is usually modeled as continuous Darcian flow, ignoring that sufficient fluid overpressure can cause hydraulic fractures as fluid pathways with very dynamic behavior. Resulting hydraulic fracture networks are largely self-or...

A long-standing ambition in ecosystem science has been to understand the relationship between ecosystem community composition, structure and function. Differential water use and hydraulic redistribution have been proposed as one mechanism that might allow for the coexistence of overstory woody plants and understory grasses. Here, we investigated how patterns of hydraulic redistribution influenc...

In the last years, the scientific literature has reported an increasing use of hydraulic models to describe water distribution systems (WDS). Hydraulic models represent tools for managing the complexity of WDSs, and a number of optimization methods have been proposed to improve the performance of these infrastructures. However, because of the lack of available data on WDSs many works have only ...

In this paper we study fluid flow in fractures using numerical simulation and address the challenging issue of hydraulic property characterization in fractures. The methodology is based on Computational Fluid Dynamics, using a finite-volume based discretization scheme. Steady-state, viscous, laminar flow simulations for a Newtonian fluid are carried out in both 2D and 3D fracture models. In 2D,...

39 S oil hydraulic parameters are essential input to most hydrologic and climatic models (Mohanty et al., 2002; Mohanty and Zhu, 2007). Th ey are used to defi ne the hydraulic characteristics of the soil vital in modeling soil moisture and fl ux in the unsaturated zone near the land–atmosphere boundary. At the scale of model applications, it is very important to defi ne the appropriate paramete...