Fluid flows at and below the earth's surface are the cause and cure of problems of water and soil pollution. Petroleum an natural bas production depends on flow in the earth's surface. Length scales of practical and economic interest range from tens of meters to kilometers. However large scale behavior depends critically upon physics and much smaller length scales, from meters (lithography and fractures in the subsurface) to centimeters (depositional variations) to microns (pore throats in soil and sedimentary rock, fracture apertures, and microbial and geochemical activity). A wide disparity in time scales also exists, from nearly instantaneous chemical reactions to daily tidal movements to water infiltration into waste repositories over millennia. Moreover different physical processes occur simultaneously in different parts of the domain (e.g., single phase flow within an aquifer, multiphase flow in the vadose zone above the aquifer, and shallow water transport in a river or wetland in contact with the porous medium).

Effective management of reservoirs, aquifers, bays and esturaries demands rapid, reliable forecasts of behavior. Our proposal would develop much needed scientific understanding of small-scale phenomena from theory and experiment. It would also provide the new computational tools and strategies required for incorporating this understanding at the practical scale, for handling multiple types of physics across subdomains, for remote collaboration, and for visualizing and manipulating the results.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9873326

Any options, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.