Nonlinearity continuation method for steady-state groundwater flow modeling in variably saturated conditions

Abstract: Application of nonlinearity continuation method to numerical solution of steady-state groundwater flow in variably saturated conditions is presented. In order to solve the system of nonlinear equations obtained by finite volume discretization of steady-state Richards equation, a series of problems with increasing nonlinearity are solved using the Newton method. This approach is compared to pseudo-transient method on several test cases, including real site problems and involving parallel computations.