What aquifer characteristics can be determined using a tracer test?
Daniel Rodriguez
Published Mar 01, 2026
What aquifer characteristics can be determined using a tracer test?
Total pore volume, as well as phase volumes or saturations, can be determined if the appropriate tracers are used. If multiple extraction wells are used, the spatial distribution of these properties can be estimated from differences in residence times for each injection/extraction well pair.
How do you test groundwater?
General characteristics. Most commonly an aquifer test is conducted by pumping water from one well at a steady rate and for at least one day, while carefully measuring the water levels in the monitoring wells. When water is pumped from the pumping well the pressure in the aquifer that feeds that well declines.
What are tracer tests?
Tracer Testing: A method based on injecting chemical tracers into the reservoir and monitoring how long it takes and where those tracers travel. A tracer test involves the use of some chemical tracer that can be detected within the reservoir fluids in very small concentrations.
Why is tracer analysis used in porous media?
Therefore, tracer tests are widely used for characterization and evaluation of the porous media for flow behavior (Scholz et al., 2012), which can provide useful information about the porous media, such as, heterogeneity of oil and gas reservoirs and re- sidual oil saturation.
What is a conservative tracer?
A conservative tracer is a tracer that is not lost in the system (bit can be completely recovered)
What is land subsidence?
Land subsidence is a gradual settling or sudden sinking of the Earth’s surface due to subsurface movement of earth materials. The main cause of subsidence in California is groundwater pumping.
What is groundwater analysis?
The groundwater analysis can determine if there has been evidence of negative environmental effects. Groundwater contamination concerns can derive from industrial firms assessing the acidity of runoff or landfill or industrial waste sites concerns with waste seepage.
What is groundwater sampling?
Groundwater sampling is typically performed to monitor water quality, study recharge and flow in groundwater systems, and evaluate degree of mixing in between meteoric water and thermal fluids in geothermal reservoirs. Other definitions:Wikipedia Reegle.
What is the permeability and porosity of rocks?
More specifically, porosity of a rock is a measure of its ability to hold a fluid. Permeability is a measure of the ease of flow of a fluid through a porous solid. A rock may be extremely porous, but if the pores are not connected, it will have no permeability.
What material is porous?
Sponges, wood, rubber, and some rocks are porous materials. In contrast, marble, glass, and some plastics are not porous and contain very few open pockets of air (or pores). A rock with good porosity is an important characteristic for an oil well.
What are ocean tracers?
Tracers serve as a “dye” with which to follow the circulation of ocean waters. Conventional ocean tracers include temperature, salinity, oxygen, and nutrients. Stable isotope tracers, such as oxygen-18 and carbon-13, do not decay. In contrast, other radioactive tracers do decay.
What is the chemical composition of the tracer fluid?
The most-applied chemical water tracers are fluorinated benzoic acids. A large suite of mono-, di- and tri-fluorinated benzoic acids have been qualified as tracers.
What is the ground-water tracer?
——-\\f PREFACE An Introduction to Ground-Water Tracers has been developed in conjunc- tion with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for use by persons in- volved in efforts to determine the direction and velocity of ground-water flow.
Do we need a minimum scale (spacing) tracer test?
Longi- tudinal dispersivity was found to increase with the scale of the experiment, indicating that a minimum scale (spacing) tracer test is required to provide values of transport properties representative of processes on the order of tens to hundreds of meters, the scale of many contaminant plumes.
Why study hydraulic tracers?
If enough information is collected, the study of tracers can also help with the determination of hydraulic conductivity, por- osity, dispersivity, chemical distribution coefficients, and other hydro- geologic parameters.
What is a tracer and how is it used?
A tracer can be entirely natural, such as the heat carried by hot-spring waters; it can be accidentally introduced, such as fuel oil from a ruptured storage tank; or it can be introduced intention- ally, such as dyes placed in water flowing within limestone caverns (Davis et al., 1980).