Historically the major advances, or radical paradigm shifts, in subsurface hydrology have been the result of ideas or tools borrowed from other disciplines. Among these ideas and tools are geostatistical data synthesis, stochastic models, numerical solutions to PDE's, and generalized scaling and coarse graining concepts.
Though significant progress has been made over the past few decades in modeling subsurface flows and transport, we are a long way from being able to quantitatively predict the movement of miscible and immiscible fluids and colloids in the deeper subsurface (aquifers), and of water and dissolved constituents in the near-surface (soils). Difficulties abound with theories of multiphase flow, flow in swelling media, descriptions and ramifications of spatial heterogeneity, hysteresis, chemical aging, microbial transport and degradation, multiscale processes, and etc.
There are two purposes for the proposed workshop:
i. To bring together researchers from disparate disciplines (e.g., math, physics, chemistry, engineering sciences) to discuss their approaches to related problems in other fields of science, and allow them to interface with hydrologists.
ii. To write a white paper for NSF-hydrology on modern tools and approaches which have the potential to seriously advance hydrologic modeling.
It is anticipated that a wide variety of topics and approaches will be discussed: Among these are chaos and nonlinear dynamics, homogenization, CTRW and fractional approaches, stochastic dynamics, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, percolation, renormalization, projection operators, stochastic perturbation theories, complexity theory, as well as many others. The conference will not focus on numerical methods, but rather on novel approaches to describe multiscale physics, chemistry and microbiology.
