Dr. Larry Lemke's and his graduate students' studies of the Gelman site presents some of the challenges:
Some of these photos by Ryan Stanton from the 5/9/2016 CARD meeting are very relevant but more relevant to the discussion of "layer cake aquifer models" is this presentation deck by Dr Lemke from 10/07/2017 MOEMA conference.
There's also this video clip of the PlayDoh model from 2004.
This image from a 2009 Cypher & Lemke report also shows how flow can change based on modeling using the limited available data under different pumping scenarios.