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USING A HEAT PULSE TO MEASURE THE FLUX BETWEEN GROUNDWATER AND SURFACE WATER
Citation:
Enfield*, C G. AND B. Lien*. USING A HEAT PULSE TO MEASURE THE FLUX BETWEEN GROUNDWATER AND SURFACE WATER. Presented at American Geophysical Union (AGU) Meeting, San Francisco, CA, December 13 - 17, 2004.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
EPA estimates that 10 percent of the sediments under the surface waters of the United States are contaminated and approximately 20 percent of the superfund sites include contaminated sediments. The risk associated with these contaminated sediments is directly related to the flux of water passing between the groundwater surface water. Design of potential corrective actions requires knowledge of the fluxes in an effort to reliably measure the temporal changes in water flux that may change direction as well as amplitude over time, we have developed an instrument capable of measuring flow and direction that is capable of measuring water flux with less than 10 percent error. The instrument measures the movement of a pulse of heat injected into a pipe by watching the change in temperature at four locations, two on each side of the heater and calculates the advective flux based on both the peak arrival time and moment analysis of the thermograph. We present the design of the instrument, illustrate the calibration and data analysis and discuss sources of error in the measurement.