Evaluation of uncertainties originating from the different modeling approaches applied to analyze regional groundwater flow in the Tono area of Japan

Ijiri, Yuji*; Saegusa, Hiromitsu; Sawada, Atsushi ; Ono, Makoto*; Watanabe, Kunio*; Karasaki, Kenji*; Doughty, C.*; Shimo, Michito*; Fumimura, Kenichi*

Qualitative evaluation of the effects of uncertainties originating from scenario development, conceptual models, and parameter values is an important subject in the area of safety assessment for high-level nuclear waste disposal. In this study, regional-scale groundwater flow analyses for the Tono area, Japan were conducted using three continuous models which were designed to handle heterogeneous porous media. We evaluated the simulation results to quantitatively analyze uncertainties originating from conceptual models. We found that uncertainties originating from conceptual models (1) greatly depend on boundary conditions and hydrological structures to be modeled, which are assigned by modelers, and (2) are larger than uncertainties originating from the variance in realizations of the Monte Carlo method in stochastic modeling.