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A highly parameterized variable-density groundwater flow and solute transport model was developed to test multiple hypotheses for upward movement of treated wastewater (effluent) injected into a saline coastal aquifer in southeastern Florida, USA. The model was designed to assess risk to a drinking-water aquifer above the zone of injection, where monitoring wells have detected effluent. The model-based analysis accommodated geological and data complexity, including the observed presence of effluent in upper monitoring wells, but not in lower monitoring wells, thereby giving the appearance of the effluent having bypassed geological layers. The modeling approach included the application of multiple methodologies to reduce model run times during parameter estimation while providing detailed calibrated model(s) that can be used to assess the potential capacity for different mechanisms of effluent migration. The methods included use of a semi-analytical equation to quickly calculate initial concentrations, parallelization of model runs over multiple processors when calibrating, and utilization of the concepts of singular value decomposition and Tikhonov regularization to accommodate a high level of parameterization complexity. The results reveal that vertical effluent migration could occur as diffuse flow through heterogeneous confining units; however, flow through a channelized pathway caused by well construction appears to be more likely.

Variable-density groundwater models require extensive computational resources, particularly for simulations representing short-term hydrologic variability such as tidal fluctuations. Saltwater-intrusion models usually neglect tidal fluctuations and this may introduce errors in simulated concentrations. The effects of tides on simulated concentrations in a coastal aquifer were assessed. Three analyses are reported: in the first, simulations with and without tides were compared for three different dispersivity values. Tides do not significantly affect the transfer of a hypothetical contaminant into the ocean; however, the concentration difference between tidal and non-tidal simulations could be as much as 15%. In the second analysis, the dispersivity value for the model without tides was increased in a zone near the ocean boundary. By slightly increasing dispersivity in this zone, the maximum concentration difference between the simulations with and without tides was reduced to as low as 7%. In the last analysis, an apparent dispersivity value was calculated for each model cell using the simulated velocity variations from the model with tides. Use of apparent dispersivity values in models with a constant ocean boundary seems to provide a reasonable approach for approximating tidal effects in simulations where explicit representation of tidal fluctuations is not feasible.