Articles | Volume 29, issue 6
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-1569-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-1569-2025
Research article
 | 
24 Mar 2025
Research article |  | 24 Mar 2025

Feature scale and identifiability: how much information do point hydraulic measurements provide about heterogeneous head and conductivity fields?

Scott K. Hansen, Daniel O'Malley, and James P. Hambleton

Related subject area

Subject: Groundwater hydrology | Techniques and Approaches: Uncertainty analysis
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Cited articles

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Short summary
We consider how well one can identify hydraulic conductivity that varies from place to place by using only measurements obtained at a finite number of groundwater monitoring wells. In particular, we relate how accurately features (meaning connected high- or low-conductivity regions) are identified to their size and to well spacing, and we examine which kinds of information are most valuable. When feature size exceeds 4 times the well spacing, better-than-random identification is possible.
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