Analytical analysis of soil-moisture and trace-contaminant transport

A transport model is presented which predicts the coupled movement of both water and trace contaminants through a layered and unsaturated soil-moisture zone. In order to achieve computation speeds suitable for watershed implementations, moisture properties are approximated as exponential functions of pressure head, and lateral flows are treated as sinks in a basically vertical one-dimensional analysis. In addition, only advection by the Darcy-flow velocities and linear adsorption by the soil matrix are considered in depicting movement of the trace contaminant. Formal solution of the resulting transport equations is obtained through use of both eigenfunction-expansion and coordinate-transformation methods. Numerical solution is effected by means of a program written in FORTRAN IV and implemented on an IBM 360/91 computer. Two example calculations illustrate both strengths and weaknesses of our model