Interested in a hydrology and geophysics short course?
Check out the course description, and make sure you are available March 16-18, 2005. |
A New Aquifer Test Method: Hydraulic Tomography
Aquifers are heterogeneous at a multiplicity of scales. This is the rule rather than the exception. Traditional aquifer test analysis (i.e., Theis and Jacob methods), however, assumes aquifer homogeneity. If a pumping well taps into a high permeable zone and an observation well is installed in a low permeable zone, do you know what estimate you get from this type of test and analysis? Common sense tells you the analysis compares apples to oranges but you never question it. Let us show you that this analysis is indeed bogus(see Interpretation of Pumping Test Results). Even better, let's show you that with the same well facilities and costs, you can do better if you conduct pumping tests intelligently or using common sense (see hydraulic tomography section or presentation). |
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Some examples of hydraulic tomography - click graphics to see more
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Exploiting Natural Stimuli for Large-scale Groundwater Basin Surveys
Tomographic surveys of the subsurface are the future. Expanding this new technology to basin-scale problems requires excitations that can affect a large extent of an aquifer. Naturally and frequently occurring stimuli (such as storms, precipitation, lightning, earthquakes, volcano activities, river-stage fluctuations, etc) are perfect excitations for this purpose. For example, cloud to ground direct lightning occurs frequently in many parts of the world, strikes different parts of a basin, contains enormous amount of energy, and transmits a broad-band of electric magnetic waves into the subsurface. If we can harvest these signals from the subsurface, we have naturally occurring large-scale EM surveys and we can see into the subsurface at great depths and over large areas. In other words, Mother Nature continuously sends out signals to lure us to unveil her mystery. Why do we ignore her? We will show you how we can exploit the natural stimuli for monitoring, charactering, and forecasting subsurface processes (see autonomic fusion of information). 'Seeing' into the subsurface is not a mission impossible. |
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NEW!
Check out slide shows of my research group's latest presentations in topics of subsurface hydrology:
Interpretation of Pumping Test Results in heterogeneous media (comparing apples to oranges?)*
Hydraulic Tomography a powerful new aquifer test method*,
Autonomic Fusion of information in the subsurface (including the use of natural stimuli) *.
Note: slide shows in frames work best in the latest version of Internet Explorer; Acrobat pdf versions of the presentations (no animations) are available from the * links. |
