A fractal-multifractal approach to groundwater contamination. 2. Predicting conservative tracers at the Borden site

Abstract.

 In a companion paper (Puente et al., this issue), the capability of a deterministic fractal-multifractal (FM) approach to faithfully and compactly describe the geometry of chloride and bromide tracers gathered at the Borden site was illustrated. As trends in surrogate parameter space were found for successive plume contours (i.e. linear growth in coordinates by which fractal interpolating functions pass, nearly constant rotations and fairly high scalings), this article reports usage of a variety of prediction schemes, based on linear regressions and the aforementioned trends, in order to study the evolving plumes. It is shown that the FM representation leads to plausible non-Gaussian plume evolutions and yields predictions that closely approximate records for a period of time that extends even beyond one year. It is illustrated that such predicted geometries are also consistent with predictions made via stochastic theories (i.e. Dagan, 1984).