9706623 Puente The final goal of this work is to study the possibility of studying the dynamics of transport in porous media based on a compact geometric representation of evolving plumes. The approach is motivated by the fact that most current (stochastic) transport models, by relying on averaging procedures to transfer uncertainties due to porous media heterogeneities, often lead to unreliable predictions which do not preserve the non-elliptical and generally tangled geometries that natural plumes have. Guided by the success in using the fractal-multifractal, FM, representation, developed by the proposer (Puente, 1992, 1994, 1995), to study the dynamics of vertically-averaged chloride as measured at the Borden Site in Ontario, Canada, this works seeks to further study the capabilities of such a procedure in encoding two and three dimensional natural plumes. The tasks that shall be undertaken during the first year are: (a) geometric encoding of vertically-averaged bromide concentration patterns as measured at the Cape Cod site, (b) compact parameterization of whole three-dimensional plumes at the Cape Cod site via extensions of the FM approach One such tasks are performed the information they provide, in terms of geometric surrogate parameters, shall be used (later on) to study the dynamics of the plume. Throughout the study, research will continue on the use of sophisticated search algorithms for the efficient solving of the inverse problem which defines surrogate parameters at a given time.
