Final Report                                                                                                                                      Dr. Sanders

The format of the final report appears below.  The report should be typed, double-spaced, with margins of one inch all around.  Please turn in a printed copy of your paper (including the figures), plus a diskette on which you have saved a copy of your Graphic Groundwater model.

All of the headings that appear below also should appear in your paper. Information in italics below tells you what type of information should be included in that section of the report.  Information in regular font (non-italics) is either the heading of a section (in bold type) or subsection (un-bold type) that should appear in your report.  A checklist of all the section headings appears here.

In a few cases, I have given you language (several sentences) that you may copy and paste directly into your report.  Although this is considered plagiarism in any other case, in this case and this case only I am giving you permission in advance for you to use it.  If you have questions, please e-mail me or call.

Papers will be graded according to a grading rubric.

Title Page (use a large, bold font for the title, and a smaller font for everything else.  Center the text, both vertically and horizontally).  It should look something like this:

The abstract should give a brief (2-4 paragraphs, less than a page) synopsis of what was done (the five-year recharge area was delineated), what the basic geology and hydrogeology are, how the project was done (you constructed a numerical model using Graphic Groundwater, MODFLOW, and MODPATH), and what the results and conclusions are.

Introduction

Purpose

You can use this language directly, if you want:  The purpose of this study is to delineate a wellhead protection area (WHPA) for [how many CWS wells, what the facility name is], Illinois by using a numerical model.  The WHPA of interest is the five-year recharge area, projected vertically to the ground surface.

Geographic Setting

Tell where the area is located (counties, lat/long, Twp/Rng/Sec).  At the end of that sentence, refer to Figure 1, which will be a map of the area.  Tell what the major geographic features are.  These may be towns, rivers, lakes, or other features that would help the reader locate the area.

Describe the topography briefly.  Are there topographic features of importance (e.g. moraine, outwash plain)?  What is the range of ground surface elevations in the area?  What is the elevation of the river?  Where is the CWS well located within this scheme?

Describe the surface water drainage:  what major streams are present, what direction(s) do they flow, what body of water do they ultimately flow into, and where does that confluence occur?

Geology

How was the geology of the area determined?  What data sources were used, and where did they come from?
Make this statement:  “A representative cross section appears in Figure 2.”, and then include your cross section as Figure 2.

Bedrock Geology

What geologic formation forms the bedrock in the area?  What does this formation consist of?  What is the elevation of the top of the bedrock, and where did your info come from?  What is the depth of the top of the bedrock?  Are there any structural features (folds, faults, etc.) to the bedrock that might be important in this study?

Quaternary Geology

What geologic formations form the Quaternary sediments in the area?  (Give their formal names.)  What type of materials are they made of?  How were they deposited?  During what glacial epoch?  During what glacial stage?  Cite your sources.

Hydrogeology

Conceptual Model

Describe the hydrostratigraphy, boundaries to the flow system, and stresses.

Ground Water Flow

What water-level data do you have for wells in the area (if any)?  What other water-level data do you have—for example, water levels in the river or other lakes?  What is the general direction of water flow in the area (if you know it)?

CWS Well

Give the latitude and longitude of the CWS well.  Also give the location in the Township/Range/Section system.  How much water is pumped from the CWS well within the model area?  (Give it both in gallons per day and per year, and in cubic feet per day and per year.)

Numerical Modeling Methods

Please use the following paragraph to introduce your numerical modeling methods section:

The USGS programs MODFLOW (McDonald and Harbaugh, 1988) and MODPATH (Pollock, 1989 and 1994) were used to model ground water flow in the study area.  These programs were used with the pre- and post-processor Graphic Groundwater, Version 3.48 (Esling, 2001).

Grid Construction

How did you construct the variable-width grid?  (You used Microsoft Excel and copied and pasted cell dimensions into GGW.)  How did you decide what the dimensions of each cell should be?  What were the dimensions of the cells in the immediate vicinity of the CWS wells?  What was the maximum cell dimension?

Layers

How many layers does your model have?  What does each layer represent?

Model Parameters

Layer Type

Use the following paragraph for Layer Type:

Layer type Option 3 (Confined/Unconfined) was selected to represent the layer characteristics.  This corresponds to the LAYCON value in MODFLOW.  Under this option, transmissivities are recalculated at each iteration.

Porosity

What value(s) of porosity did you input?  Why?  Do these values seem appropriate for the particular type of material in the area?  How do you know?  (Cite a source.)

Top and Bottom Elevations

How did you determine top elevation of the aquifer?  How did you input this info?
How did you determine bottom elevation of the aquifer?  How did you input this info?

Initial Heads

What initial heads did you enter into the model?  How did you decide on this value or these values?

Hydraulic conductivity

How did you estimate the hydraulic conductivity of the materials in your model area?  Cite your sources.
For vertical conductivity, you can use this paragraph (unless, of course, you have better info on vertical K in your area!):

The vertical hydraulic conductivity was set one order of magnitude lower than horizontal hydraulic conductivity, at [fill in your value here] ft/day.  No published data were available for vertical conductivity of this layer; therefore, it was assumed to be one order of magnitude lower than the horizontal conductivity.  This anisotropy ratio falls within the range typically used in ground water modeling (Anderson and Woessner, 1992).

Recharge

How did you determine what values to enter for recharge?  Cite any sources you used.

Particle Tracking and Five-Year Recharge Area Delineation

Use this language:
Particle tracking was performed by hypothetically inserting a batch of 20 particles in each well, and allowing the particles to flow backwards in time for a period of five years.  The five-year recharge area was delineated by outlining the edges of the five-year particle tracks.

Results

Use this statement:  Figure 3 shows the five-year recharge area for the CWS well.
Then, give this as Figure 3. What does the area look like?  How big is it?

Discussion

Modeled Flow System

According to the finished model, what is the general direction of flow in the aquifer?  Is this consistent with the conceptual model?  Try running the model with a pumping rate of zero, and again with a higher pumping rate.  Does the pumping well alter the direction of flow significantly?

Five-Year Recharge Area

What is the general shape and size of the recharge areas for the wells?  What is the direction of movement of particles toward the wells?

References (This is just a start.  Include any others that you cite in your paper!  Use the format shown here.)

Anderson, Mary P. and William W. Woessner.  1992.  Applied Groundwater Modeling: Simulation
     of flow and advective transport:  San Diego, California: Academic Press.

Esling, Steven.  2001.  Graphic Groundwater, Version 3.48.  Southern Illinois University.
    Accessed at http://bear.geo.siu.edu/GraphicGroundwaterPage.htm.

McDonald, Michael G. and Arlen W. Harbaugh.  1988.  A modular three-dimensional finite-difference
     ground-water flow model: Techniques of Water-Resources Investigations, Book 6, Chapter A1.
     United States Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia.

Pollock, D. W. 1989.  Documentation of computer programs to compute and display pathlines using
     results from the U.S. Geological Survey modular three-dimensional finite-difference ground-water
     flow model.  U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia. Open File Report OF 89-0381.

Pollock, David W.  1994.  User’s guide for MODPATH/MODPATH-PLOT, version 3; a particle
     tracking post-processing package for MODFLOW, the U.S. Geological Survey finite-difference
     ground-water flow model.  U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia.  Open File Report OF 94-0464.
 
 

© 2002 Laura L. Sanders.  Last updated April 17, 2002.