Indicator Geostatistical Analysis of Sand Interconnections Within a Till

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1996

Abstract

At the Fernald Environmental Management Project (FEMP) site in southwestern Ohio, sand and gravel lenses within till provide potential pathways for the flow of contamination into the underlying aquifer. These high-permeability lenses account for 22% of the volume of the till, have a complex arrangement, and are smaller in scale than the site. Even the relatively dense subsurface sampling program at the FEMP site is not adequate to determine facies interconnections with certainty. To delineate probable facies boundaries, a binary indicator random variable was used to represent the presence of high or low-permeability sediment. The 800 available lithologic logs that penetrate the till were coded with the binary system at 2 ft (0.6 m) intervals yielding 15,829 observations. These data were used to compute the declustered mean of indicator values in horizontal intervals, giving an estimate of the proportion of high-permeability sediment in each vertical zone. The areal correlation in specific zones was examined through indicator variograms, which had pronounced anisotropy. Three-dimensional indicator point kriging was used to produce maps of the probability of existence of high-permeability sediment. These maps were used in a preliminary analysis of sand body interconnectedness. Results indicate that portions of sand bodies are interconnected through the entire interval studied and that the areal extent of vertical interconnection is up to 1000 ft.

DOI

10.1111/j.1745-6584.1996.tb02179.x

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