Water-Resources Investigations Report 00-4282

Preliminary Evaluation of the Importance of Existing Hydraulic-Head Observation Locations to Advective-Transport Predictions, Death Valley Regional Flow System, California and Nevada

CONTENTS

Abstract

Introduction

The Death Valley Regional Flow System

Methods of Evaluation

Predictions of Interest

Statistics for Evaluating Observation Locations

Prediction standard deviation--Measure of prediction uncertainty

Increased uncertainty statistic

Dimensionless scaled sensitivity

Using the statistics

Grouping of Observations

Results of Evaluation

Omission of Individual Observations

Is an observation important to any of the predictions?

How does observation importance vary with advective transport direction?

What is the breadth of each observation's importance?

How does observation importance vary on a site-specific basis?

Omission of Observation Groups

Is a group important to any of the predictions and how does group importance vary with transport direction?

What is the breadth of each group's importance?

Omission of a Set of 100 Low-Importance Individual Observation Locations

Summary and Conclusions

References Cited

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