Zone integrated double constraint methodology for calibration of hydraulic conductivities in grid cell clusters of groundwater flow models

This paper deals with the double-constraint methodology for calibration of steady-state groundwater flow models. The methodology is based on updating the hydraulic conductivity of the model domain by comparing the results of two forward groundwater flow models: a model in which known fluxes are specified as boundary conditions and a model in which known heads are specified as boundary conditions. A new zone-integrated double-constraint approach is presented by partitioning the model domain in zones with presumed constant hydraulic conductivity (soft data), and the double-constraint methodology is reformulated accordingly. The feasibility of the method is illustrated by a practical case study involving a numerical steady-state groundwater flow model with about 3 million grid blocks, subdivided into four zones corresponding to the major hydrogeological formations. The results of the zone-integrated double-constraint method for estimating the horizontal and vertical hydraulic conductivities of the zones compare favourably with a classical model calibration based on minimisation of the differences between calculated and measured heads, while the double-constraint method proves to be more robust and computationally less cumbersome.