Statistics

Spatial dependence

Geotechnical engineering

Physics

Groundwater

Groundwater recharge

Bivariate analysis

Aquifer properties

Skewness

Geology

Mathematics

Aquifer

Porosity

Thermodynamics

Entropy (arrow of time)

Statistical physics

Porous medium

Soil science

Water Resources Research

We propose a novel approach to link solute transport behavior to the physical heterogeneity of the aquifer, which we fully characterize with two measurable parameters: the variance of the log K values ( ), and a new indicator ( H R ) that integrates multiple properties of the K field into a global measure of spatial disorder or geological entropy . From the results of a detailed numerical experiment considering solute transport in K fields representing realistic distributions of hydrofacies in alluvial aquifers, we identify empirical relationship between the two parameters and the first three central moments of the distributions of arrival times of solute particles at a selected control plane. The analysis of experimental data indicates that the mean and the variance of the solutes arrival times tend to increase with spatial disorder (i.e., H R increasing), while highly skewed distributions are observed in more orderly structures (i.e., H R decreasing) or at higher . We found that simple closed‐form empirical...

Geological entropy and solute transport in heterogeneous porous media