International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

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Dear Colleagues,

There are 1322 Superfund sites on the National Priorities List (and 53 new sites proposed) still awaiting the completion (or beginning) of environmental remediation in the USA. The time necessary to clean up a typical site will likely exceed 100 years. The national Superfund Cleanup debt continues to grow, and it has been estimated to be well above a trillion dollars. Similarly challenging environmental remediation awaits completion (or beginning) in other industrialized and industrializing countries. Therefore, new approaches to and ideas for soil and aquifer remediation as well as protection are desperately needed.

With this in mind, this Special Issue of IJERPH will focus on novel field-, laboratory-, and pore-scale studies in subsurface hydrology and hydrogeology. We encourage submissions with new insights into the structure of pore/fracture spaces and transport of water, contaminants, and/or nutrients through these spaces in saturated and unsaturated (vadose) zones. Particularly welcome are papers with novel approaches to mapping and visualizing the internal structure of the porous/fractured media and to measuring physical, chemical, and biological properties of subsurface environments that affect modeling of transport processes. We encourage submissions involving experiments that refine or challenge our understanding of these processes. We would like to see a mixture of papers across all scales of the subsurface media, from the pore scale through the laboratory scale to the field scale.

We invite you to consider submitting your paper involving broadly understood field-, laboratory-, or pore-scale experiments related to the transport of water and/or contaminants or nutrients in saturated and unsaturated (vadose) zones.

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open access journal published semi-monthly online by MDPI in Switzerland. More information about the journal is available at its website https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph. The journal’s 5-year Impact Factor is 2.608 (2017). Indexed by a number of high-visibility databases, including Web of Science (Science Citation Index Expanded) and Scopus (Elsevier), this open-access journal offers a much wider reach for its papers than do traditional, subscription-based journals. With 9981 papers already published (as of April 15, 2019, according to Web of Science), IJERPH is indeed a solid, well-established journal that is here to stay.

Again, please consider submitting your work to this special issue and, if accepted, experience the benefits of publishing in a well-established open-access journal.

Dr. Zbigniew Kabala
Guest Editor

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Keywords

Tracer tests
Column studies
Pore-scale physical models
Tomography
Nuclear magnetic resonance
Single and multiple borehole tests

Published Papers (1 paper)

Research

19 pages, 1813 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Predicting Water Cycle Characteristics from Percolation Theory and Observational Data

by Allen Hunt, Boris Faybishenko, Behzad Ghanbarian, Markus Egli and Fang Yu

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17(3), 734; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17030734 - 23 Jan 2020

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3098

Abstract

The fate of water and water-soluble toxic wastes in the subsurface is of high importance for many scientific and practical applications. Although solute transport is proportional to water flow rates, theoretical and experimental studies show that heavy-tailed (power-law) solute transport distribution can cause chemical transport retardation, prolonging clean-up time-scales greatly. However, no consensus exists as to the physical basis of such transport laws. In percolation theory, the scaling behavior of such transport rarely relates to specific medium characteristics, but strongly to the dimensionality of the connectivity of the flow paths (for example, two- or three-dimensional, as in fractured-porous media or heterogeneous sediments), as well as to the saturation characteristics (i.e., wetting, drying, and entrapped air). In accordance with the proposed relevance of percolation models of solute transport to environmental clean-up, these predictions also prove relevant to transport-limited chemical weathering and soil formation, where the heavy-tailed distributions slow chemical weathering over time. The predictions of percolation theory have been tested in laboratory and field experiments on reactive solute transport, chemical weathering, and soil formation and found accurate. Recently, this theoretical framework has also been applied to the water partitioning at the Earth’s surface between evapotranspiration, ET, and run-off, Q, known as the water balance. A well-known phenomenological model by Budyko addressed the relationship between the ratio of the actual evapotranspiration (ET) and precipitation, ET/P, versus the aridity index, ET₀/P, with P being the precipitation and ET₀ being the potential evapotranspiration. Existing work was able to predict the global fractions of P represented by Q and ET through an optimization of plant productivity, in which downward water fluxes affect soil depth, and upward fluxes plant growth. In the present work, based likewise on the concepts of percolation theory, we extend Budyko’s model, and address the partitioning of run-off Q into its surface and subsurface components, as well as the contribution of interception to ET. Using various published data sources on the magnitudes of interception and information regarding the partitioning of Q, we address the variability in ET resulting from these processes. The global success of this prediction demonstrated here provides additional support for the universal applicability of percolation theory for solute transport as well as guidance in predicting the component of subsurface run-off, important for predicting natural flow rates through contaminated aquifers. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Field-Scale, Laboratory-Scale, and Pore-Scale Studies in Subsurface Hydrology and Hydrogeology)

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