Discrete stability of the Differential System Method evaluated with geostatistical techniques

Abstract

The Differential System Method (DSM) permits identification of the physical parameters of finite-difference groundwater flow models in a confined aquifer when piezometric head and source terms are known at each point of the finite-difference lattice for at least two independent flow situations for which the hydraulic gradients are not parallel. Since piezometric head data are usually few and sparse, interpolation of the measured data onto a regular grid can be performed with geostatistical techniques. We apply kriging to the sparse data of a synthetic aquifer to evaluate the stability of the DSM with respect to uncorrelated measurement errors and interpolation errors. The numerical results show that the DSM is stable.