Comments on 'validation of two innovative methods to measure contaminant mass flux in groundwater' by Goltz et al

摘要

I wish to comment on the paper published by Goltz et al. on this journal, titled Validation of two innovative methods to measure contaminant mass flux in groundwater (Goltz et al., 2009). The paper presents the results of experiments Goltz et al. conducted on an artificial aquifer for the purpose of validating two recently developed methods to measure contaminant mass flux in groundwater, the tandem circulation well (TCW) method and the modified integral pumping test (MIPT) method. Their experiment results showed that the TCW method implemented using both the multi-dipole technique and the tracer test technique successfully estimated the mass fluxes with respective accuracies within 2% and 16% of the known values. The MIPT method, on the other hand, underestimated the mass flux by as much as 70%. My comments focus on the MIPT method.