Calibrated Properties Model

This report has documented the methodologies and the data used for developing rock property sets for three infiltration maps. Model calibration is necessary to obtain parameter values appropriate for the scale of the process being modeled. Although some hydrogeologic property data (prior information) are available, these data cannot be directly used to predict flow and transport processes because they were measured on scales smaller than those characterizing property distributions in models used for the prediction. Since model calibrations were done directly on the scales of interest, the upscaling issue was automatically considered. On the other hand, joint use of data and the prior information in inversions can further increase the reliability of the developed parameters compared with those for the prior information. Rock parameter sets were developed for both the mountain and drift scales because of the scale-dependent behavior of fracture permeability. Note that these parameter sets, except those for faults, were determined using the 1-D simulations. Therefore, they cannot be directly used for modeling lateral flow because of perched water in the unsaturated zone (UZ) of Yucca Mountain. Further calibration may be needed for two- and three-dimensional modeling studies. As discussed above in Section 6.4, uncertainties for these calibrated properties are difficult to accurately determine, because of the inaccuracy of simplified methods for this complex problem or the extremely large computational expense of more rigorous methods. One estimate of uncertainty that may be useful to investigators using these properties is the uncertainty used for the prior information. In most cases, the inversions did not change the properties very much with respect to the prior information. The Output DTNs (including the input and output files for all runs) from this study are given in Section 9.4