Integrating Geophysics, Geology, and Hydrology for Enhanced Hydrogeological Modeling

Geophysical measurements are important for providing information on the geological structure to hydrological models. Regional scale surveys, where several watersheds are mapped at the same time using helicopter borne transient electromagnetic, results in a geophysical model with a very high lateral and vertical resolution of the geological layers. However, there is a bottleneck when it comes to integrating the information from the geophysical models into the hydrological model. This transformation is difficult, because there is not a simple relationship between the hydraulic conductivity needed for the hydrological model and the electrical conductivity measured by the geophysics. In 2012 the Danish Council for Strategic Research has funded a large research project focusing on the problem of integrating geophysical models into hydrological models. The project involves a number of Danish research institutions, consulting companies, a water supply company, as well as foreign partners, USGS (USA), TNO (Holland) and CSIRO (Australia). In the project we will: 1. Use statistical methods to describe the spatial correlation between the geophysical and the lithological/hydrological data; 2. Develop semi-automatic or automatic methods for transforming spatially sampled geophysical data into geological- and/or groundwater-model parameter fields; 3. Develop an inversion method for large-scale geophysical surveys in which the model space is concordant with the hydrological model space 4. Demonstrate the benefits of spatially distributed geophysical data for informing and updating groundwater models and increasing the predictive power of management scenarios. 5. Develop a new receiver system for Magnetic Resonance Sounding data and further enhance the resolution capability of data from the SkyTEM system. 6. In test areas in Denmark, Holland, USA and Australia we will use data from existing airborne geophysical data, hydrological and geological data and also collect new airborne data, MRS surface and downhole data, and pump test data. The project is still in a startup phase but we already have results from two existing algorithms. The first one is an algorithm making a full joint inversion of Magnetic Resonance Sounding (MRS) data, Transient Electromagnetic Data (TEM) and pump test data. The second one is an algorithm using geostatistic and linear inverse theory to link boreholes categorized into clay and sand sequences together with electrical resistivities measured in spatially distributed soundings resulting in 3D models of clay and sand. We will present the HyGEM project and show results from the first two algorithms developed in the project.