[ Lernziele / Kompetenzen ] ‘Artificial tracer technique’ (ATT, in course 3) stands for any means of inferring the properties of a (mostly, largely unknown) system by studying the behavior of an item added to it in a well-defined quantity and manner. ATT for practical purposes (like fluid residence time estimation for delineating groundwater protection zones, inferring fluid exchange rates, or the hydraulic uncoupling between hydrogeological compartments) require a different mindset than ATT for research purposes (e.g., for developing novel tracer species). A proper statement and understanding of an ATT’s purpose is the essential prerequisite to the choice of suitable tracers, the adequate design and dimensioning of tracer additions, of fluid sampling, of tracer signal metering and interpretation, and to the proper handling of ATT-related legal and environmental aspects. Course 3 emphasizes practical rather than research aspects, and field-scale rather than laboratory-scale applications of ATT. Especially at catchment scale, AT signal interpretation benefits from powerful analogies with natural (isotope) tracer signal evaluation methods introduced within course 1.
[ Prüfungsanforderungen ] … … …, ATT aims and principles, inter-well vs single-well (with or without lateral drift) design advantages/challenges, paradigms of hydrogeologic parameter inversion from natural and artificial tracer signals (distributed vs lumped-parameter models).
[ teachers / lecturers ] J. Ghergut, S. Schmidt, with H. Behrens as a guest lecturer
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