Sediment Bed Borehole Advection Method

Abstract

This paper introduces and tests the Sediment Bed Borehole Advection Method (SBBAM), a low cost, point-measurement technique which utilizes a push-point probe to quantify the vertical direction and magnitude of Darcy flux at the surface water—groundwater sediment interface. The Darcy flux measurements are derived from the residence-time analysis of tracer arrival calculated from measured tracer concentration time-series data. The technique was evaluated in the laboratory using a sediment bed simulator tank at eight flow rates (1–90 cm/day). Triplicate test runs for each flow rate returned average errors between 4–20 percent; r2 = 0.9977.