Toward maximizing utility of geophysical approaches for groundwater management
Abstract
As is true for many 21st Century science, increasingly powerful and sophisticated advances in one discipline may not be fully realized in others. Recently, advances in geophysical approaches appropriate for groundwater applications are wide-ranging, spanning more accessible and cost efficient airborne geophysical surveys to extracting more information from existing observation wells with borehole NMR. However, those advances are not routinely brought to bear to groundwater management issues. The reasons are multifaceted. Time available for decision making has decreased, thus serial execution of a geophysical-hydrogeological workplan takes too much time. Jointly conducted studies using early but necessarily approximate intermediate results may help address this factor. In addition, regulators cannot follow all advances in all scientific disciplines used for their decision making, thus cannot be expected to support new and innovative approaches by rote. High-profile projects that simultaneously apply new techniques while informing and educating the regulator and other stakeholders are key to more widespread acceptance. Finally, new advances are typically described in terms of contribution to the scientific literature yet groundwater management decision making often focus less on academic metrics and more on cost-benefit analyses. Thus, increased reporting of how new insight gained from geophysical investigation translates into more cost-effective groundwater management strategies is needed. Isolated examples exist for cases where these challenges were overcome, yet more effort will be needed to truly maximize the potential benefits from applying geophysical approaches to groundwater management issues.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMNS43A..01H
- Keywords:
-
- 0933 Remote sensing;
- EXPLORATION GEOPHYSICS;
- 1829 Groundwater hydrology;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1835 Hydrogeophysics;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1880 Water management;
- HYDROLOGY