A stochastic texture-based approach for evaluating solute travel times to groundwater at regional scale by coupling GIS and transfer function

Interpreting and predicting the evolution of non-point source (NPS) pollution of soil and surface and subsurface water from agricultural chemicals and pathogens, as well as overexploitation of groundwater resources at regional scale are continuing challenges for natural scientists. The presence and build up of NPS pollutants may be harmful for both soil and groundwater resources. Accordingly, this study mainly aims to developing a regional-scale simulation methodology for groundwater vulnerability that use real soil profiles data. A stochastic approach will be applied to account for the effect of vertical heterogeneity on variability of solute transport in the vadose zone. The approach relies on available datasets and offers quantitative answers to soil and groundwater vulnerability to non-point source of chemicals at regional scale within a defined confidence interval. The study area is located in the Metaponto agricultural site, Basilicata Region-South Italy, covering approximately 12000 hectares. Chloride will be considered as a generic pollutant for simulation purposes. The methodology is based on three sequential steps: 1) designing and building of a spatial database containing environmental and physical information regarding the study area, 2) developing travel time distributions for specific textural sequences in the soil profile, coming from texture-based transfer functions, 3) final representation of results through digital mapping. Distributed output of soil pollutant leaching behavior, with corresponding statistical uncertainties, will be visualized in GIS maps. Of course, this regional-scale methodology may be extended to any specific pollutants for any soil, climatic and land use conditions. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.