Well vulnerability: a quantitative approach for source water protection

The concept of vulnerability of drinking water sources is reviewed, and a quantitative approach for assessing well vulnerability for complex three-dimensional ground water systems is developed. The approach focuses on the relative expected impact of potential contaminant sources at unknown locations within a well capture zone, providing relative measures of intrinsic well vulnerability, including the expected times of arrival of a contaminant, the dispersion-related reduction in concentration, the time taken to breach a certain quality objective, and the corresponding exposure times. Thus, the result of the analysis includes the usual advective travel time information used in conventional wellhead protection analysis, plus a set of selected quantitative measures expressing the expected impact. The technique is based on adjoint theory and combines forward- and backward-in-time transport modeling using a standard numerical flow and transport code. The methodology is demonstrated using the case study of a complex glacial multiaquifer system in Ontario. The new approach will be useful in helping water managers develop more physically based and quantitative wellhead protection strategies.