• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.87-97
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• 2020

In this study, the applicability of the geostatistical evolution strategy as an inverse analysis method of estimating hydraulic properties of small-scale basin was tested. The geostatistical evolution strategy is a type of data assimilation method that can effectively estimate aquifer hydraulic conductivity by combining a global optimization model of the evolution strategy and a local optimization model of the ensemble Kalman filtering. In the applicability test, the geometry, hydraulic boundary conditions, and the distribution of groundwater monitoring wells of Hanlim-Eup were employed. On the other hand, a synthetic hydraulic conductivity distribution was generated and used as the reference property for ease of estimation quality assessment. In the estimations, two different cases were tested where, in Case I, both groundwater levels and hydraulic conductivity measurements were assumed to be available, and only the groundwater levels were available, in Case II. In both cases, the reference and estimated hydraulic conductivity fields were found to show reasonable similarity, even though the prior information for estimation was not accurate. The ability to estimate hydraulic conductivity without accurate prior information suggests that this method can be used effectively to estimate mathematical properties in real-world cases, many of which little prior information is available for the aquifer conditions.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.703-713
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• 2020

In many geological fields, including hydrogeology, it is of great importance to determine the heterogeneity of the subsurface media. This study briefly introduces the concept and theory of the method that can estimate the hydraulic properties of the media constituting the aquifer, which was recently introduced by Park (2020). After the introduction, the method was applied to the synthetic aquifer to demonstrate the practicality, from which various implications were drawn. The introduced technique uses a global optimization technique called the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES). Conceptually, it is a methodology to characterize the aquifer heterogeneity by assimilating the groundwater level time-series data due to the imposed hydraulic stress. As a result of applying the developed technique to estimate the hydraulic conductivity of a hypothetical aquifer, it was confirmed that a total of 40000 unknown values were estimated in an affordable computational time. In addition, the results of the estimates showed a close numerical and structural similarity to the reference hydraulic conductivity field, confirming that the quality of the estimation by the proposed method is high. In this study, the developed method was applied to a limited case, but it is expected that it can be applied to a wider variety of cases through additional development of the method. The development technique has the potential to be applied not only to the field of hydrogeology, but also to various fields of geology and geophysics. Further development of the method is currently underway.