Xiao-Wei Jiang

China University of Geosciences (Beijing) · School of Water Resources and Environment

Groundwater flow systems and stagnant zones in drainage basins are critical to a series of geologic processes. Unfortunately, the difficulty of mapping flow system boundaries and no field example of detected stagnant zones restrict the application of the concept of nested flow systems. By assuming the variation in bulk resistivity of an aquifer wit...

Although it has been reported that flowing artesian wells could be topographically-controlled, there is no quantitative research on artesian flow conditions in unconfined aquifers. In this study, the water table, which has a lower amplitude than the land surface, is damped from the topography and used as the boundary condition to obtain the analyti...

Lithium (Li) isotopes have shown large potential in tracing weathering in various water bodies, but there is limited study on Li isotopes in subsurface conditions where CO2 has been largely consumed. In this study, we use a thick sandstone aquifer in the Ordos Basin, NW China, as a natural setting to investigate the behaviors of Li isotopes in hydr...

在区域尺度上,地下水流的路径存在跨越地表分水岭的可能性,从而形成跨流域地下水循环,影响流域之间的水文关系和溶质输送过程。跨流域地下水循环的研究在国际上尚处于起步阶段,方兴未艾,目前已经取得的进展是一个值得关注的问题。对近20年来国内外跨流域地下水循环的研究文献进行了系统的跟踪分析,从形成机理、识别方法和影响评估3个角度总结现有的研究进展。在水动力学形成机理方面,已经从理论上确定了地表分水岭、潜水面最高点和地下水流系统分水点之间的偏离特征,为划分河流之间的多种跨流域地下水循环路径提供了依据。在跨流域地下水循环的识别方面,一系列实际流域的案例提供了可以借鉴的方法,包括水均衡法、流域水文模型和水文地球化学端元混合模型等,证实了跨流域地下水循环的存在性,甚至评估出其循环通量,深化了流域水量平衡关系的...

Digital rock twins are widely used to obtain hydraulic properties of porous media by simulating pore-scale fluid flow. Multifractal characteristics of pore geometry and flow velocity distribution have been discovered with two-dimensional (2D) images and three-dimensional (3D) models, whereas the dependency of results on the resolution is not well k...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiGSSxTIUPQ&t=1s Link of the EGU presentation

大气降水的氢氧同位素含量具有高程效应，降水入渗后参与地下水循环，其高程效应如何受地下水流系统的影响转 化为地下水氢氧同位素的深度效应？现有研究对于这个问题缺少定量认识。文章构建单向倾斜盆地和双峰波状盆地的稳 态地下水循环理论模型，采用MODFLOW模拟剖面二维地下水流场、采用MT3DMS模拟重同位素分子的对流-弥散过程， 得到地下水D和 18 O含量的空间分布，探讨了氢氧同位素高程效应在地下水流系统转化为深度效应的机理。结果表明：在 单斜盆地，补给区大气降水D和 18 O含量的高程效应转化为排泄区地下水δD和δ 18 O值随埋深增大而指数型衰减的深度效 应；在双峰波状盆地，当含水层渗透性相对入渗强度较大时(K 0 /w=1 000)，仅发育一个区域地下水流系统，在区域地下水的 排泄区δD和δ...

Consideration of regional groundwater flow in aquifer systems allows for solving groundwater issues on a larger scale than single aquifers and contributes to all practical aspects of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for water. The approach has been extended to a wide range of hydrogeological environments. However, it suffers from poorly const...

Rock moisture, which is considered as a hidden component of the terrestrial hydrological cycle, has received little attention. In this study, the frequency-domain reflectometry (FDR) is used to obtain fluctuating rock water content in a sandstone cave of the Yungang Grottoes, China. We identified two major cycles of rock moisture addition and deple...

The motivation for this topic stemmed from practical questions posed to the Regional Groundwater Flow Commission (RGFC) of the IAH regarding assessing transboundary aquifer systems. These questions focused on sedimentary basins which were considered aquifer systems even though the information on hydrogeological units and groundwater flow in the bas...

Submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) has been widely recognized as an important source of dissolved nutrients in coastal waters and affects nutrient biogeochemistry. In contrast, little information is available on SGD impacts on coastal carbon budgets. Here, we assessed the SGD and associated carbon (dissolved inorganic carbon [DIC] and total alka...

Causes and water sources of flowing artesian wells attracted the interest of many hydrogeologists throughout history, however, a quantitative model that satisfactorily considers the roles of topography, groundwater recharge/discharge and aquitards on hydraulics of flowing wells is still lacking. In this study, a three-layer river-valley basin with...

Freezing-induced groundwater-level decline is widely observed in regions with a shallow water table, but many existing studies on freezing-induced groundwater migration do not account for freezing-induced water-level fluctuations. Here, by combining detailed field observations of liquid soil water content and groundwater-level fluctuations at a sit...

Freezing-induced water migration and groundwater level decline are widely observed in regions with shallow water table, but many existing studies trying to quantify freezing-induced groundwater migration do not account for water level fluctuations induced by freezing and thawing. Here, detailed field observations of liquid soil water content and gr...

The gushing of water from flowing wells attracted public attention and scientific curiosity as early as the 17th century, but little attention has been paid to the influence of flowing wells on the evolution of groundwater science. This study asserts that questions posed by flowing wells since the early 19th century led to the birth of many fundame...

Improved understanding of interactions among the atmosphere, soil water and groundwater can be achieved by observing time-series of soil-water content and water-table fluctuations in a soil profile. Field observations at a site in China show that from mid-June to mid-September, when evapotranspiration is strong, direct groundwater recharge does not...

The spewing of groundwater in flowing wells is a phenomenon of interest to the public, but little attention has been paid to the role of flowing wells on the science of groundwater. This study reviews that answering to problems related to flowing wells since the early 19th century led to the birth of many fundamental concepts and principles of grou...

The groundwater divide within a plane has long been delineated as a water table ridge composed of the local top points of a water table. This definition has not been examined well for river basins. We developed a fundamental model of a two-dimensional unsaturated-saturated flow in a profile between two rivers. The exact groundwater divide can be id...

A large number of lakes are distributed in the Badain Jaran Desert located at the northwest inland, China. Water evaporation is a key factor in the water cycle of lake and the entire desert. Based on the long-term meteorological and evaporative data from September 11, 2012 to March 26, 2013 and from May 8, 2013 to June 23, 2015 monitored by automat...

Compared with the numerous studies on river and soil waters, studies on Mg isotopes of groundwater are limited. In this study, a sandstone aquifer in the Ordos Basin, China with contrast contents of Mg in shallow and deep groundwater is selected to examine the behavior of Mg isotopes during groundwater circulation. The δ²⁶Mg values of shallow groun...

Groundwater sampled at the outlets of uncased flowing wells in a thick unconfined aquifer, which has undergone mixing, has been found to have hydrochemistry similar to deep groundwater in discharge areas. To identify the hydrodynamic causes, transient models of groundwater flow and age in a three-dimensional homogeneous unit basin with flowing well...

The occurrence of flowing wells in basins has been found to be closely related to the discharge area with an upward hydraulic gradient. Unfortunately, previous studies on upward gradient induced wellbore flow with equaling total inflow (Qin) in the deep and total outflow (Qout) in the shallow could not explain the occurrence of flowing wells. By re...

The Ordos Basin is one of the most intensively studied groundwater basins in China. The Ordos Plateau, located in the north part of the Ordos Basin, is ideal to study the pattern of regional groundwater circulation induced by water-table undulations due to the wavy topography and the relatively simple aquifer systems with macroscopically homogeneou...

Soil saturation is thought to be an important control on plant zonation in intertidal wetlands, but quantitative studies linking saturation and plant zonation in real marsh systems are few. We conducted a combined field and modeling study to examine the potential links between groundwater flow and ecological zonation in a brackish marsh in the Yang...

Radium and radon mass balance models have been widely used to quantify submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) in the coastal areas. However, the losses of radium or radon in seawater caused by recirculated saline groundwater discharge (RSGD) are ignored in most of the previous studies for tracer-based models and this can lead to an underestimation o...

Although it has been increasingly acknowledged that groundwater flow pattern is complicated in the three-dimensional (3-D) domain, two-dimensional (2-D) water table-induced flow models are still widely used to delineate basin-scale groundwater circulation. However, the validity of 2-D cross-sectional flow field induced by water table has been seldo...

Nested groundwater flow systems have been revealed in Tóth's theory as the structural property of basin-scale groundwater circulation but were only well known with two-dimensional (2D) profile models. The method of searching special streamlines across stagnation points for partitioning flow systems, which has been successfully applied in the 2D mod...

As an indispensable component of groundwater circulation, groundwater evapotranspiration rate (ETG) estimation using water table fluctuations is a hot research topic in the past decades. However, most existing methods for estimating ETG using either diurnal or seasonal water table fluctuations are based on the assumptions that groundwater recharge...

The region between Wuding River and Dosit River in the Ordos Plateau, China, is a typical arid to semi-arid zone in Northwest China. This region is covered by the Mu Us desert, whereas shallow groundwater exists in many places, which created a favorable condition for vegetation growing. Previous studies showed that the vegetation coverage in the Or...

Near- and off-shore fresh groundwater resources become increasingly important with the social and economic development in coastal areas. Although large scale (hundreds of km) submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) to the ocean has been shown to be of the same magnitude order as river discharge, submarine fresh groundwater discharge (SFGD) with magni...

The exchange rate between seawater and groundwater in a tidal flat was investigated at Laizhou Bay, China, where there are large-scale seepage faces with horizontal extension of several hundred meters developed during low tides. Taking into account the effects of seepage face and density, a simple and efficient method for estimating seawater–ground...

The theory of regional groundwater flow is critical for explaining heat transport by moving groundwater in basins. Domenico and Palciauskas’s (1973) pioneering study on convective heat transport in a simple basin assumed that convection has a small influence on redistributing groundwater temperature. Moreover, there has been no research focused on...

Analytical studies on release/capture zones are often limited to a uniform background groundwater flow. In fact, for basin-scale problems, the undulating water table would lead to the development of hierarchically nested flow systems, which are more complex than a uniform flow. Under the premise that the water table is a replica of undulating topog...

The increasing demand in recent years for energy in China has resulted in coal being mined in complex geological conditions. This has included the mining of coal seams located beneath reservoirs, aquifers and flooded abandoned mine workings. Throughout China the extraction of coal in these circumstances has resulted in groundwater inrushes into wor...

The stagnant zones in nested flow systems have been assumed to be critical to accumulation of transported matter, such as metallic ions and hydrocarbons in drainage basins. However, little quantitative research has been devoted to prove this assumption. In this paper, the transport of age mass is used as an example to demonstrate that transported m...

Water table variation will result in considerable variation of the weight of the pore water, which has loading effects on the groundwater flow in the underlying confined aquifer. Here we present an analytical solution on such a loading effect in a coastal aquifer system consisting of an unconfined aquifer, a confined aquifer, and an impermeable lay...

Theoretical analysis and field observations suggest that the depth-dependent trend of permeability anisotropy is a nature of the geological media accompanying the depth-decaying permeability. However, the effect of depth-dependent anisotropy has not been investigated in previous studies of regional groundwater flow. A more general analytical soluti...

The existence of stagnation points in nested flow systems is relevant to a range of geologic processes. There has been no analytical study on the characteristics and locations of stagnation points in nested flow systems. We derived analytical solutions for hydraulic head and stream function in basins with isotropic and depth-decaying hydraulic cond...

The geostatistical characterization of hydraulic conductivity heterogeneity has been a hot research topic. In this study, the hydraulic conductivity measurements along two sections at the Borden aquifer are utilized for analysis. The effect of outliers on the normality of log hydraulic conductivity (ln/K) is discussed using histograms and probabili...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of systematic and local heterogeneity on groundwater flow, transport, and residence time distributions (RTDs) of basins where groundwater flow is topography driven. Systematic heterogeneity is represented by an exponentially depth-decreasing hydraulic conductivity and porosity, and local heterogeneity is re...

Permeability loss with depth is a general trend in geological media and plays an essential role in subsurface fluid flow and solute transport. In the near surface zone where groundwater movement is active, the decrease in permeability with depth is dominated by the mechanical compaction of deformable media caused by the increase in lithostatic stre...

The age of groundwater is a manifestation of the temporal scale of groundwater flow in basins, whose pattern was recently found to be influenced by depth-dependent hydraulic conductivity (K). In this paper, we show through numerical simulations how well-documented depth-decaying K and porosity ($\theta$) influence groundwater age. In the unit basin...

Regional groundwater flow is critical for understanding a variety of geologic processes. Unfortunately, few studies have considered the impact of gradual decrease in hydraulic conductivity (K) with depth on groundwater flow. In this study, regional groundwater flow through a basin is analyzed under conditions of exponentially decaying K with depth....

Discontinuity normal stiffness and deformation modulus of large scale rock masses are very difficult to determine. A method for estimation of discontinuity normal stiffness based on the decrease in transmissivity with depth has been proposed by the authors in a former paper. In the current study, the method is further developed by accounting for th...

Both porosity and deformation properties of porous media are dependent on stress. For geological media, the stress-dependent porosity and deformation properties can be shown to be depth related. Unfortunately, both in situ porosity and in situ deformation properties are difficult to measure. In the current study, a method is developed to evaluate t...

: Heterogeneity of permeability in fractured media is a hot research topic in hydrogeology. Numerous approaches have been proposed to characterize heterogeneity in the last several decades. However, little attention has been paid to correlate permeability heterogeneity with geological information. In the present study, several causes of permeabilit...

Hydraulic conductivity is indispensable for groundwater modeling in fractured rock masses while deformation modulus is required for stability evaluation of rock masses. Unfortunately, the variations in hydraulic conductivity and deformation modulus with depth are usually ignored, which would lead to inaccurate results. The feasibility of estimating...

A new method for determination of fracture normal stiffness is developed in this paper. From the point of hydro-mechanical coupling, the relationship between transmissivity and depth is utilized to calculate fracture normal stiffness of large-scale rock masses, which is an important but difficult-to-obtain parameter. The basic idea is that flow in...

The objective of this article is to examine the effect of NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) images estimation using four geostatistical algorithms: Ordinary Kriging (OK), Universal Kriging (UK), Indicator Kriging (IK), and Sequential Indicator Simulation (SIS). Using the undersampled NDVI data obtained from a NOAA/AVHRR image, both esti...

On the basis of local measurements of hydraulic conductivity, geostatistical methods have been found to be useful in heterogeneity characterization of a hydraulic conductivity field on a regional scale. However, the methods are not suited to directly integrate dynamic production data, such as, hydraulic head and solute concentration, into the study...