Notice of RetractionComparative Study of Numerical Delineation for Wellhead Protection Area under Steady-State and Transient State

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

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Groundwater protection is of great importance in terms of public health and environmental safety. Wellhead Protection Area (WHPA) Delineation is a basic and effective measurement for protecting groundwater from contaminated. Different methods of WHPA delineation can be selected depending on the feasible data and complexity of the hydrogeologic conditions, during which numerical simulation is one of the most popular methods. However, simple steady-state assumptions were always made to simplify the calculation and inaccurate estimations may be resulted in. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of considering transient property for delineating WHPA. The popular numerical model (MODFLOW) combined with a particle tracking code (MODPATH) were used and the WangDuZhuang (WDZ) wellfield in Beijing, China was taken as an example. Both transient and steady-state models were calculated and different WHPAs were gained and compared. The transient WHPA are comparable in shape with the steady one but not in size due to the differences in drawdowns taking in account the seasonal variation of recharge. The influence of considering the transient property was discussed.