Assessment of the relative vulnerability of groundwater to pollution: a review and background paper for the conference workshop on vulnerability assessment

TLDR: In this paper, the authors present a review of existing approaches and discuss their merits and drawbacks in relation to attempts to validate the procedures and the overall aim is to produce, eventually, a method of vulnerability assessment applicable at regional (and in simplified form at State or National) scale.

Abstract: deterministic techniques are more appropriate for sub-regional predictive (quantitative) assessment and are tied to specific perceived processes. Probabilistic techniques are data intensive and involve groundwater numerical modelling as they are thus inappropriate for broad, regional vulnerability assessments based on readily available spatial variables. It is concluded that stochastic techniques offer more promise than other techniques involving weights-of-evidence modelling; new work in this area is described. We review here available approaches and discuss their merits and drawbacks in relation to attempts to validate the procedures. The overall aim is to produce, eventually, a method of vulnerability assessment applicable at regional (and in simplified form at State or National) scale, using information which is readily available from existing or planned databases. We regard data availability as essential in development of these models/assessment procedures, and below we evaluate the different methods against this constrain t. Assessment procedures