Modeling saltwater intrusion scenarios for a coastal aquifer at the German North Sea

Abstract

A 3d regional density-driven flow model of a heterogeneous aquifer system at the German North Sea Coast is set up within the joint project NAWAK (“Development of sustainable adaption strategies for the water supply and distribution infrastructure on condition of climatic and demographic change”). The development of the freshwater-saltwater interface is simulated for three climate and demographic scenarios. Groundwater flow simulations are performed with the finite volume code d3f++ (distributed density driven flow) that has been developed with a view to the modelling of large, complex, strongly density-influenced aquifer systems over long time periods.

Uncertainty Quantification in Coastal Aquifers Using the Multilevel Monte Carlo Method

“…This software has been applied for subsurface flow simulations of real-world aquifers (cf. [65]). The toolbox was parallelized using MPI, and the presented results were obtained on the Shaheen II cluster provided by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.…”

“…Many acres of farmland may be lost because they can become too wet or salty to grow crops. Therefore, accurate modeling of different scenarios of saline flow is essential [1,65] to help farmers and researchers develop strategies to improve the soil quality and decrease saltwater intrusion effects.…”

“…To reduce the high computing complexity, we applied the existing MLMC technique. We use the multigrid ug4 software library as a black-box solver, allowing us to solve the Henry problem and others (see more in [65]). We run all MLMC random simulations in parallel.…”

Aspects of Solvers for Large-Scale Coupled Problems in Porous Media

“…3, cf. Schneider et al (2018) for a 3D application. Note that this model neglects phenomena in the transition layer between the parts.…”

“…This topic naturally concerns the simulations in the field of hydrogeology, where an additional level of complexity is introduced by the curly shape of the domain, moving phreatic surfaces, the heterogeneity of the porous media, e.g., fractures and thin layers, which are often part of the problem formulation, as well as the poroelasticity of the rock, cf. (Schneider et al 2012(Schneider et al , 2018Lee et al 2017;Lu and Wheeler 2009). Just as in the multi-scale structure of the geometry, couplings are thus present in all stages of the solution process.…”