Propagation of water pollution uncertainty and risk from the subsurface to the surface water system of a catchment

SummaryThis paper investigates the propagation of quantifiable probability and quantification uncertainty of water pollution from local pollutant sources at and below the land surface, through the groundwater system, to downstream surface water recipients. Methodologically, the study shows how the risk and uncertainty of surface water pollution within a catchment may be assessed by a combined methodology of a Lagrangian stochastic advective-reactive modelling approach, which accounts for the quantifiable pollutant transport randomness, and a scenario analysis approach, which accounts for different quantification uncertainties. The results show that, in general, unambiguous risk assessment requires at least a reliable order-of-magnitude quantification of the prevailing relation between the average rate of physical pollutant transport from source to recipient and the average rate of pollutant attenuation. If this average relation can be reliably estimated to fall within two identified, relatively wide open value ranges, the assessment of pollution risk to surface waters from localised sources at or below the soil surface may be unambiguous even under otherwise large quantification uncertainty. For a relatively narrow, closed value range of this average rate relation, however, risk assessment must either rely on conservative assumptions, or else be based on a more detailed and resource demanding quantification of pollutant transport.