(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1993-04)
Radcliffe, David E.; Tillotson, P. M.; Hendrix, P. F.; West, Larry T.; Tollner, E. W.; Box, J. E.
A recent study of rural shallow drinking wells found that 4.6% of the wells in the Piedmont region of Georgia had nitrate levels above the EPA recommended level of 10
ppm nitrate nitrogen (Tyson and Issac, 1991). The most likely sources of this nitrate are septic systems, fertilizers,
and manures. Nitrate transport models such as LEACHN (Wagenet and Hutson, 1989) can be used to investigate the contributions of these sources to groundwater contamination,
but the models require soil transport parameters that are difficult to measure. Another problem is that we are interested in predicting nitrate transport at the field
scale, but transport parameters are usually measured on a much smaller soil volume.