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An aquifer in the same geologic unit may be confined in one area and unconfined in another. Unconfined aquifers are sometimes also called water table or phreatic aquifers, because their upper boundary is the water table or phreatic surface (see Biscayne Aquifer). Typically (but not always) the shallowest aquifer at a given location is ...
(unconfined), where S y is the specific yield of the aquifer. Note that the partial differential equation in the unconfined case is non-linear, whereas it is linear in the confined case. For unconfined steady-state flow, this non-linearity may be removed by expressing the PDE in terms of the head squared:
For a confined aquifer or aquitard, storativity is the vertically integrated specific storage value. Specific storage is the volume of water released from one unit volume of the aquifer under one unit decline in head. This is related to both the compressibility of the aquifer and the compressibility of the water itself.
Recharge is the primary method through which water enters an aquifer. This process usually occurs in the vadose zone below plant roots and is often expressed as a flux to the water table surface. Groundwater recharge also encompasses water moving away from the water table farther into the saturated zone. [1]
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 19 February 2025. Water located beneath the ground surface An illustration showing groundwater in aquifers (in blue) (1, 5 and 6) below the water table (4), and three different wells (7, 8 and 9) dug to reach it. Groundwater is the water present beneath Earth's surface in rock and soil pore spaces and in ...
In confined aquifers , the cone of depression is a reduction in the pressure head surrounding the pumped well. When a well is pumped, the water level in the well is lowered. By lowering this water level, a gradient occurs between the water in the surrounding aquifer and the water in the well. Because water flows from high to low water levels or ...
The Dupuit–Forchheimer assumption holds that groundwater flows horizontally in an unconfined aquifer and that the groundwater discharge is proportional to the saturated aquifer thickness. It was formulated by Jules Dupuit and Philipp Forchheimer in the late 1800s to simplify groundwater flow equations for analytical solutions.
There are two types of aquifers: confined and unconfined. In confined aquifers, there is an overbearing layer called an aquitard, which contains impermeable materials through which groundwater cannot be extracted. In unconfined aquifers, there is no aquitard, and groundwater can be freely extracted from the surface.