Delineation of Wellhead Protection Areas in the Umbria region. 2. Validation of the Proposed Procedure

In the companion paper [1] a procedure has been presented to delineate the wellhead protection areas in the Umbria region, where a large number of minor groundwater resources are exploited. While the national and the regional regulations do not differentiate in the protection area delineation guidelines between large and small resources, the proposed procedure allows increasing the model complexity with the increase in the resource relevance and hence in the degree of knowledge about the aquifer. In this paper the procedure is tested with reference to actual cases and the results of models with different complexity are compared. The importance of the effects of the mean-regional gradient on the delineation of the protection area for small catchments is pointed out.