Estimating hydrogeological parameters at groundwater level observation wells without pumping well information

Aquifer pumping is a common method of meeting human water needs, but it can also disrupt the natural flow of groundwater and cause fluctuations in groundwater levels. These fluctuations, however, can provide useful insights into hydrogeological properties when measured in an observation well. Traditional modeling methods are not well suited for analyzing such data because they lack essential details about the pumping wells, such as their number, distance from the observation well, and pumping rates. To address this issue, new impulse response function for transfer function modeling is developed that accurately describes the confined flow in such situations. The proposed function is based on the Theis solution, which uniformly distributes the effects of multiple pumping wells within a circular area around the observation well. This allows our function to accurately estimate hydrogeological parameters and pumping rates without knowing the number and specific location of pumping wells. The effects of well distance, spatial arrangement, and aquifer anisotropy on the accuracy of our function are also analyzed using synthetic experiments and Morris sensitivity analysis. The results show that the proposed function is effective in estimating essential hydrogeological parameters, such as the aquifer storativity, using only drawdown time series data from a observation well.