Simultaneous use of hydrogeological and geophysical data for groundwater protection zone delineation by co-conditional stochastic simulations

Delineation of protection zones is performed by the use of stochastic simulations integrating all available data. In practice, due to the few available measurements of the main parameters, it can be very useful to integrate other data to reduce the uncertainty of the results. Most of the solute spreading is governed by the hydraulic conductivity (K) spatial variability at different scales. A stochastic approach adding measured piezometric heads and electrical resistivity data is presented. Results are discussed on a synthetic and on a practical case. Delineating the ‘Capture zone Probability Distribution’ (CaPD) for a given time, it is shown how the uncertainty can be reduced. The methodology can be used in real applications when little or no information is available about the hydraulic properties, through the conditioning on other data sets.