Towards Reliable Groundwater Models for Water Resource Management

Addressing water resource management issues has been an ongoing challenge for many decades. Mathematical modeling is a vehicle that can be used to address water sustainability questions and to deliver different management scenarios given a set of constrains to achieve sustainability goals. So, the key question here is can we have a reliable mathematical model that can lead to reliable and credible results? The answer to this question is found by addressing the model calibration step which is a vital step to produce robust hydrogeological models that can be used with confidence.;The purpose of this research is summarized in three folds as follows. First I explore multimodal analysis of a solute transport problem with exploration of sensitivity analysis of the modeled transport process, and with study of the error in state variable observations and how this can mislead to incorrect mathematical model. Second, I investigate the effects of the forward model solution schemes on the inverse problem solution of given density-driven flow problem. Lastly, I present a mathematical proof that highlights the importance of groundwater age information to constrain the inverse problem in order to estimate hydraulic conductivity field of a given porous media uniquely. Each of these three folds' works have been published in the peer reviewed hydrology journal Water Resources Research.