A synthetic study of the worth of transmissivity and head data to delineate groundwater protection zones in braided alluvial aquifers

Kriging, Stochastic conditional simulations, and stochastic inversion are compared to characterize a synthetic hypothetical braided alluvial aquifer. The performance of the three techniques is compared in terms of reproduction of a 10-day capture zone of a pumping well. The results obtained compare fairly well with previous investigations dealing with the stochastic delineation of capture zones. However, the presence of a large number of deterministic channels in the reference transmissivity field reduces significantly the accuracy of the three techniques as compared to previous published results.