Groundwater Hydrology and Hydraulics

This book is an outgrowth of a course in ground-water hydrology taught for seniors and first-year graduate students in Agricultural Engineering, Civil Engineering, Geology, and Watershed Science. The selection of subject material and presentation has been favorably received by both students and professionals in these disciplines. The book is designed, primarily, for use as a text, but the emphasis on basic physical and mathematical concepts should be found useful to professional hydrologists and geohydrologists as well.

It has been our experience, both in teaching and in professional practice, that a solid background in fundamentals and a thorough understanding of ground-water phenomena in idealized cases contributes immeasurably to imaginative and successful analysis, synthesis, and solution of field problems; even when the results from idealized situations are not directly applied.

Presentation of the subject matter begins with an overview of ground-water hydrology with a definition of some basic terms and a limited discussion of the role of geology as a fundamental supporting science. The role of groundwater in the hydrologic cycle is implicit in the material of Chapter I where groundwater storage and water budgets are discussed. Fluid flow through porous media is presented in Chapter III with emphasis on Darcy’s Law and its significance. The discussions of steady and unsteady flow in Chapters IV and V emphasize local groundwater problems such as well flow, drainage, mine-inflow, and other common groundwater issues. A chapter on finite difference techniques is included to provide the student with an introduction to methods and tools available for basin-wide or regional analysis. One feature of the book that we hope will be especially useful to the reader is the numerous worked examples and the problem sets at the end of each chapter. Many of the examples and problems are designed to help elucidate principles and several are straight-forward applications of the text material, but in contexts that deviate to some degree from the context of the original presentation to facilitate reduction of the tendency for the reader to associate a particular development with only the context in which it was derived.