A Regional Model Comparison between MODPATH and MT3D of Groundwater Travel Time Distributions

Groundwater quality changes in wells and streams lag behind changes to land use due to groundwater travel times. Two contaminant transport methods were compared to assess differences in their simulated travel time distributions (TTDs) to streams and wells in the Wisconsin Central Sands. MODPATH simulates advective groundwater flow with particle tracking, while MT3D simulates age‐mass using a finite difference solution without dispersion to allow for direct comparison of the two methods. MODPATH appropriately simulates groundwater TTDs from the water table to surface discharge but is subject to inaccuracies at weak‐sink well cells due to the flow‐model grid discretization and imprecise location of well discharge within well cells. MT3D better represents weak‐sink well cells since it removes mass in proportion to the prescribed pumping rate, although travel time within well cells is neglected. Conversely, MT3D's treatment of surface water boundary cells is not as accurate as MODPATH because mass should be removed from the water table rather than the full cell volume. MT3D simulations of TTDs can also be confounded by the instantaneous vertical distribution of mass introduced throughout recharge cells instead of at the water table, which initiates mass along deeper flow paths. We evaluated 9 MODPATH and 13 MT3D implementations, generating differences in median travel times of up to 18 years. Both methods have strengths and weaknesses, with MT3D better representing weak‐sink well cell behavior and MODPATH better representing surficial recharge and discharge. The effect of these characteristics on simulated TTDs, along with ideas for ameliorating method weaknesses, is discussed.