Throughout the United States increasing demands for safe drinking water and requirements to maintain healthy ecosystems are leading policy makers to ask complex social and scientific questions about how to assess and manage our water resources. This challenge becomes particularly difficult as policy and management objectives require scientific assessments of the potential for ground-water resources to become contaminated from anthropogenic, as well as natural sources of contamination. Assessments of the vulnerability of ground water to contamination range in scope and complexity from simple, qualitative, and relatively inexpensive approaches to rigorous, quantitative, and costly assessments. Tradeoffs must be carefully considered among the competing influences of the cost of an assessment, the scientific defensibility, and the amount of acceptable uncertainty in meeting the objectives of the water-resource decision maker.
a. Description of a ground-water-flow system
b. Factors that control ground-water movement
c. Advective transport of contaminants through the ground-water-flow system
Statistical and process-based methods
SCIENTIFICALLY DEFENSIBLE GROUND-WATER-VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENTS
Examples of considerations in designing a scientifically defensible assessment
Sources of uncertainty and limitations in the index method used for hypothetical example
Sources of uncertainty and limitations in the fixed radius method used for hypothetical example 2
Summary of scientifically defensible approaches
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