Understanding the spatial and temporal dependence of the migration of conservative contaminant plume in urban groundwater environment in Panchkula region, Haryana, India

Groundwater for Sustainable Development

S K Gupta, Iti Gupta, Abhay Guleria, Deepak Swami, & Dericks Praise Shukla.

2019-04-01

This paper introduces a GIS-based simulation method to study the temporal and spatial variation of the conservative contaminant plume in the subsurface environment of Panchkula region, Haryana, India. Numerical tools within GIS framework were used to create the raster images of various flow and contaminant transport parameters. The purpose of the study is to identify the plume area at different time and to investigate the variation of contaminant concentration with depth in perspective of the nature of the subsurface formations. This method is intended to evaluate the risk assessment with minimum available data on urban groundwater flow and transport parameters. The study investigates the temporal behavior of contaminant concentration at various depths i. e. 6 m (Z = 260 m), 26 m (Z = 240 m), and 36 m (Z = 230 m) below dumping site, which is situated as 266 m above sea level (a.s.l). The study using porous-puff shows that the contaminant plume area increases with an increase in time and the concentration decreases with the increasing depth below the dumping site. It is observed that the plume area is larger at 36 m (Z = 230 m) depth as compared to plume area at other depths due to the presence of sandstone layer around the dumping site at 36 m (Z = 230 m) depth. The ground water velocity is higher in sandstone layer at 36 m (Z = 230 m) depth which cause higher dispersion of source concentration in comparison to layers at 6 m (Z = 260 m) and 26 m (Z = 240 m) depths. Results show that this method is efficient in predicting contaminant plume behavior with fewer input parameters and less complexity. The plume movement analysis can be performed as a precursor to facilitate the mitigation of contaminated regions around the dumping site.