Groundwater Monitoring Network Design Using a Space-Filling/ Bias-Reduction Heuristic
Abstract
Groundwater monitoring network design is one of the primary goals of groundwater management. In this study, a heuristic method for selecting wells to monitor groundwater flow is developed. The approach selects wells to a) maximize spread within the monitoring area (space-filling objective), b) reduce bias in estimate of groundwater level (drawdown objective) by selecting pairs of well proximal and distant from pumping areas. By selecting pairs of monitoring wells, this method is able to capture the largest and smallest drawdown in the study area while ensuring the newly added monitoring wells are at the greatest distance from existing monitoring wells. One of the advantages of this method is that it does not require water level information, obtained either from field measurements or groundwater model runs, which might be unavailable at the time of the monitoring network design; instead, this method utilizes pumping rates and locations thus can take future planning into consideration. If water level data is available then that may be included by considering it in the drawdown objective. A FORTRAN code is developed to implement this method. By changing the weighting factors, users have the flexibility on deciding the importance of pumping and spatial information to their network designs. The method has been successfully applied to monitoring network design in Upper Trinity County Groundwater Conservation District in Texas. Monitoring wells were selected from thousands of existing wells and added to the current monitoring network. The results support the decision maker on the number and distribution of a new groundwater network using existing wells. The study can be extended to improve the application of desired future condition (DFC) for Groundwater Conservation Districts in Texas.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFM.H31I1253Y
- Keywords:
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- 1848 HYDROLOGY / Monitoring networks;
- 1880 HYDROLOGY / Water management