Abstract Salinization of coastal aquifers is a current problem in many regions worldwide. Simulation of this process provides an important tool for the forecast of drinking water resources. The consideration of the unsaturated phreatic zone has an essential influence on the accuracy of the prediction. However, for the large temporal and spatial scales of the aquifers, the presence of the unsaturated subdomains creates challenging difficulties for the numerical methods. In this work, we investigate two approaches for simulating haline density-driven flow in partially saturated aquifers. The first approach, based on the Richards equation, uses a representation of the saturation field and employs an adaptive linearly implicit time discretization scheme. The second approach explicitly represents the water table using a level-set method and relies on weak coupling combined with a standard implicit Euler scheme. Both approaches employ a finite-volume discretization for spatial representation of fluid flow and salt transport. The implementation is based on the UG4 toolkit together with the parallel groundwater flow simulator d3f++. The resulting linear systems are solved using a geometric multigrid method. We compare the aforementioned approaches with respect to theoretical and numerical aspects. The performance of both methods is evaluated in three numerical experiments. In particular we demonstrate robustness of the linearly implicit scheme and introduce a stabilization for the level-set method. The high-performance computing (HPC) potential of the approaches is assessed and demonstrated as well.
Conen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.