Acquire knowledge of physical groundwater hydrology as a basis for a career as a professional geoscientist or engineer.

Develop the ability to analyze groundwater problems and identify tools and pathways that could lead to their solution.

Focus is on developing practical problem solving skills.

Learning Goals:

• Compute hydraulic heads, fluid pressures under different scenarios, given a variety of data.
• Convert heads to fluid potential and energy.
• Determine hydraulic heads from field data.
• Compute flow quantities and direction with Darcy’s law.
• Determine gradients from 3-point problems and flux calculations in isotropic or anisotropic media.
• Assess a problem, determine appropriate upscaling formula and compute K for heterogeneous systems.
• Compute K from falling head or constant head data.
• Identify boundary conditions and relationship to field conditions.
• “Read” a flow net (both heterogeneous and homogeneous), compute fluxes, heads, pressure heads from flow net information.
• Compute groundwater travel times from a flownet
• Select, design and interpret aquifer tests.
  • Distinguish between different methods to measure hydraulic conductivity in the lab and field.
  • Theis plot analysis
  • Cooper-Jacob plot analysis
  • Hvorslev analysis
• Assess groundwater sustainability and principal controls on regional water balances.
• Compute drawdowns caused by pumping using Theis solutions and well function tables.
• Recognize deviations from Theis solution in pumping test data and posit possible reasons for the deviations.
• Distinguish between the different mechanisms of storage, and parameters used to characterize it.
• Identify different boundary conditions corresponding to a physical situation.
• Apply superposition for Theis computations.
• Use of a conceptual model as the basis for a boundary value problem and quantitative analysis.
• To draw a decent (not perfect) flownet in 15 – 20 minutes and evaluate its quality.
• Ability to convert an anisotropic flownet problem to an equivalent isotropic problem and back again.
• Describe how to use of inverse procedures to identify parameters given a physical test and model of the response.
• Compute flows in an unconfined aquifer using flownets or Dupuit assumption formulas for circular or radial flow.
• Identify quick conditions and explain situations where they could exist.
• Predict the role of pore pressure changes on landslides, earthquakes, subsidence, settlement.