About GEM Center

Mission Statement

To develop, demonstrate, and promote an integrated, data-driven approach to groundwater evaluation and management that utilizes advanced and emerging technologies.

Long-Term Research Goals

To improve the quantitative and qualitative understanding of hydrogeological properties and processes through the use of geophysical data.
To characterize the properties, which control the storage and movement groundwater in the subsurface, with the accuracy and spatial coverage needed to parameterize models.

Approach

Relate geophysical and other forms of data to hydrogeological processes/properties in order to obtain qualitative and quantitative, static and dynamic, information.
Use more spatially extensive geophysical data to link borehole(geophysical and hydrogeological) and other point measurements to hydraulic properties at a range of temporal and spatial scales (local, catchment and/or watershed).
Integrate hydrogeologic processes into the acquisition, processing, inversion/interpretation and modeling of the observed geophysical signals.
Integrate geophysical and all other forms of data by accounting for the physics of each measurement, and the resulting variation in the measured parameter, measurement scale, and resolution.
Use rock physics relationships to transform measured geophysical parameters to the hydrologic parameters of interest.
Estimate the hydrologic parameters of interest through the use of various integration methods and joint inversion methods.

Short-Term (4-year) Research Goals

Obtain better conceptual and numerical models to predict dynamic behavior.
Develop new rock physics relationships and upscaling methodologies to derive hydrogeological properties from geophysical parameters.
Improve joint geophysical and hydrogeological inversions.
Establish a state-of-the art methodology: Improve the selection and combination of geophysical methods for specific groundwater applications such as artificial recharge and coastal zones/seawater intrusion (forward modeling, survey evaluation and design). Improve 'seamless' data flow from acquisition to interpretation.
Demonstrate the benefits of combining borehole data (logging data) for calibration (i.e as compared to 'standard' hydrologeologic well data) of surface geophysical methods and optimal inversion.
Test the benefits of geophysical spatio-temporal sampling (i.e time-lapse or 4D) (i.e. as compared to 'standard' hydrogeologic data).
Improve geophysical methods that utilize existing instruments. This includes all aspects of data acquisition, modeling and inversion.