The 216 km2 Neuenhagen Millcreeck catch ment can be char ac ter ized as a drought-sen si tive land scape in NE Ger many. It is therefore of fundamental human interest to understand how water that fell as precipitation moves through the unsaturated soils and re charges ground wa ter. Ad di tion ally, a better knowl edge of nu tri ent trans port from soil to ground wa ter is im por tant, es pe cially in land scapes with light sandy soils. For a better un der stand ing of these pro cesses a dual tracer field ex per i ment with bro mide (Br-) and deu te rium (D2O) was car ried out some years ago. The aim of the present study is to use the re sults of this ex per i ment to model tracer trans port in the un sat u rated zone via two dif fer ent con cepts, the clas si cal de ter min is tic advection-dis per sion equa tion and a new sto chas tic ap proach. The ad van tage of the sto chas tic mod el ling method pro posed here for field-scale tracer ap pli ca tion is to pro duce re li able in for ma tion about ex pected to tal sol ute fluxes from the un sat u - rated zone to ground wa ter and about mean tran sit times. More over, this al lows one to eval u ate the mass of sol ute in the soil profile and to determine the range of water velocity fluctuations. Field experiments should be concentrated on estimation of fluc tu a tion of wa ter flow ve loc ity to make sto chas tic mod els more ac cu rate. To sum ma rize, this work con trib utes to new mod -el ling meth ods for the sim u la tion of wa ter and sol ute trans port in un sat u rated sandy soils which are heavily af fected by droughts and irregular hydrological processes in the subsurface.