Integrated surface-subsurface hydrologic modelling of fluid flow, solute and thermal transport

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Fluid flow and spreading patterns of contaminants or thermal energy in groundwater and surface water systems are strongly influenced by the spatial variability of hydraulic parameters, multi-component chemical reaction processes and atmospheric inputs. In the context of surface and subsurface flow regimes, which are inherently coupled, realistic computational models designed to predict overland, stream and variably-saturated subsurface flow rates and contaminant and thermal energy exchange fluxes must also accommodate complex topography, spatial and temporal variations in land use/land cover and episodic or long-term forcing functions, all at the sub-watershed to watershed to continental scales in three dimensions. My recent strides in computational hydrogeology/hydrology to address problems involving strongly coupled systems have uniquely positioned us to explore many of the salient issues at hand in unprecedented detail in 3D at scales ranging from hundreds to thousands of square kilometres and beyond. In order to gain insight into the behaviour of atmospheric/surface/subsurface exchange processes in heterogeneous surface/subsurface flow systems, high-resolution numerical simulations of a variety of contemporary problems facing surface water and groundwater scientists, including model applications to well-monitored watersheds, will be performed. The proposed research will focus on both water quantity and quality issues. My research group has been actively developing and applying new 3D numerical solution strategies to solve the highly nonlinear partial differential equations describing fluid flow, mass and heat transport in an integrated surface/subsurface modelling framework. Our 3D fully-integrated surface/subsurface model HydroGeoSphere is state-of-the-art and is widely used by the scientific community. Full coupling of a parallel version of HydroGeoSphere to several well-known climate models is being performed because existing climate models fail to represent the dynamics of saturated-zone groundwater flow and the complex patterns of water infiltration/exfiltration over the land surface and related groundwater interactions between streams, wetlands and water bodies.