Directly Generating Spatially Periodic, Heterogeneous Groundwater Flow Fields: A Finite Volume Approach

We present a finite volume approach for generating doubly-periodic, 2D heterogeneous groundwater velocity fields, given an arbitrary hydraulic conductivity field discretized on a rectangular lattice. The method conserves mass, allows direct specification of any desired mean flow direction and computes the corresponding field with a single solve operation, and solves for inter-cell fluxes that may be used directly for particle tracking with the Pollock method without further interpolation. We demonstrate an open-source Python implementation of the approach that we created.