Estimates of the Mean Residence Time (MRT) or age distributions of groundwater can be used to understand the flow and storage characteristics of aquifers including impacts of subsurface heterogeneity, surface-groundwater interactions, groundwater recharge dynamics and many other processes.
Hence they are valuable tools to protect groundwater dependent eco-systems, to estimate the vulnerability and the recovery-time of groundwater bodies impacted by pollution, to define drinking water protection areas and planning the sustainable use of water resources, to quantify quality problems due to climate change impacts.
The session wants to bring together experience of applied resource management and advanced research using a wide range of different techniques (tracer techniques, modelling, etc.) to estimate groundwater age-distributions in variable aquifers at various spatial scales.