Groundwater field data capture: custom mobile apps for the groundwater industry
Alice Drummond 1 , Christian Borovac 1 1. DiscoverEI, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Objectives: This study presents a range of case studies which develop tailored mobile applications to streamline groundwater field data capture that automatically syncs to Microsoft Platforms for seamless integration.
Design and Methodology: Tailored groundwater field collector mobile applications were developed in the PowerApps platform, providing field staff with the ability to customise the data collection, management and storage process to meet individual project needs. Examples of different applications and features are presented, including:
• Direct data entry: groundwater level, quality and geological bore logs
• Google maps integration: Maps of bore locations to plan driving directions, and using mobile GPS to extract bore coordinates and elevation for sites where survey is not warranted
• Camera integration: Ability to take photos and videos of the site and automatically upload them to project SharePoint site
• Project information: links to health and safety documents, project background and communication information.
We avoid double handling of information by creating live connections between our mobile apps and clients existing Microsoft platforms (OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Excel, Power BI) to streamline data processing and automate tasks.
Original data and results: The results from this study is a suite of tailored field collection mobile applications to streamline data capture and processing, providing an alternative to written data entry and rigid field collection apps currently applied in the groundwater industry.
Conclusions: The custom mobile application tools presented in this study have broad and wide-ranging applications across the groundwater and environmental industries.
These tools can be used to both streamline data processing and improve project reporting, facilitating a culture of data driven decision making to help manage the future sustainability of our groundwater resources.
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Documenting provenance of science in a state government agency – a groundwater example
Angela London 1
1. Department for Environment and Water, Adelaide, SA, Australia
The South Australian Department for Environment and Water (DEW) has developed a comprehensive suite of standards, tools and guidelines to improve the quality and transparency of the science we produce. The approach is named MEK (Managing Environmental Knowledge). The MEK suite of resources supports the department’s Information Management Framework and is aligned to South Australia’s Digital by Default and Open Data agendas. DEW Project Management Framework (PMF) does not currently address data management in projects. The MEK fills this gap by adding steps to the project phases which enable data supply chain management. This reminds projects of the importance of early data management planning and which standards or guidelines to refer to during the execution and delivery of a project.
MEK tools support project managers and scientists to explicitly document data supply chains so that provenance of intermediate data outputs and publishable products is clear and accessible.
MEK tools include (i) data planning form for estimating resources and broad needs of a project in relation to data management, (ii) data charts that provide a visual way of describing data supply chains and (iii) data catalogue for storing detailed
metadata of each element in the data charts. The guidelines that underpin these tools include: data storage describing how to make use of the various corporate systems and applications, evaluation detailing the peer review procedures for major deliverables and evaluation guidelines for other project outputs, data
handling describing information classification and sensitive data handling, and publication including proofing and publishing procedures.
These tools and guidelines are applied and used to help manage and map groundwater data in a range of applications including groundwater modelling, resource condition reporting, and approval processes. Utilising MEK tools improves the integrity and availability of groundwater data whilst ensuring transparency and effective use of existing information systems. In addition, the MEK resources are enabling the Groundwater Team to improve its culture around data management, deliver improved groundwater science outputs and thereby enable evidence-based decision making to support the management of our State’s groundwater resources.
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Coding to automate groundwater data analysis and visualisation
Cassandra Murphy 1
1. AECOM, Melbourne, NSW, Australia
Objective: Long term groundwater level monitoring is conducted for a variety of purposes, including characterising existing hydrogeological regimes, identifying temporal changes in hydrogeological regimes, and monitoring groundwater
remediation projects. Networks of hydrostatic pressure loggers are often utilised to gain long-term, high resolution groundwater elevation data in groundwater
monitoring projects. The large amount of data generated by these long-running data logger networks is time consuming to process and display manually in hydrographs.
A custom R code, or script, has been created to streamline this process and automate the production of hydrographs for several large-scale groundwater investigation projects.
Design and Methodology: The script was developed to import raw hydrostatic pressure files and convert them to groundwater elevation, as the well location of each data logger file is identified within the code and matched to manually recorded standing water levels. Additional information can also be displayed to aid in the visual interpretation of the data. Folders of rainfall, tidal, and irrigation information can be imported and matched to the relevant groundwater elevation time series. The script then produces formatted figures displaying these data.
Results: The script has significantly reduced time spent on hydrograph production.
The implementation of a defined, repeatable process for data transformation has decreased the potential for human error, and the resulting visualisation of the data has allowed groundwater trends within the monitoring periods of these projects to be observed, including the tidal and rainfall dependent nature of recharge.
Conclusion: The creation of this data processing script made the visualisation of groundwater elevation and environmental data more efficient in several groundwater investigation projects, allowing more time for interpretation. As the collection of high-resolution environmental data becomes more common, the lessons learnt from the development of this code can be applied to a wide range of projects.
Hidden water in remote areas - using innovative exploration to uncover the past
Adrian Costar 1 , Andy Love 2 , Carmen Krapf 3 , Mark Keppel 1 , Timothy Munday 4 1. Department for Environment and Water, Adelaide, SA, Australia
2. National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training, Flinders University, Bedford Park, SA, Australia
3. Department for Energy and Mining, Adelaide, SA, Australia
4. Australian Resources Research Centre, CSIRO, Perth, WA, Australia
Reliable water availability is critical to sustaining community water supplies and determining economic development opportunities. In many cases, particularly in remote and arid areas such as in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in the far northwest of South Australia, groundwater is the only viable source of water. However, there is limited knowledge of the groundwater resources in these remote regions and the Musgrave Province, where the APY Lands is located, is no exception. Consequently, there is a need to identify and determine the potential of groundwater resources in regions – such as the APY Lands – to supplement their
91 | P a g e community water supplies and to provide water for sustainable economic
development which leads to employment opportunities.
The Goyder Institute for Water Research’s Facilitating Long-term Outback Water Solutions (G-FLOWS) suite of research projects has developed new techniques to interpret airborne electromagnetic (AEM) geophysical data, coupled with
hydrogeological techniques, to identify groundwater resources buried by deep sedimentary cover which is a major constraint to identifying water sources in the northern parts of South Australia.
In its third stage, G-FLOWS is utilising AEM data collected in 2016 to undertake a targeted program of data acquisition, interpretation and mapping of groundwater resources in the Musgrave Province. The research, a partnership between
Department for Environment and Water, CSIRO, Flinders University and the
Geological Survey of South Australia, is applying new and innovative geophysical and hydrogeological techniques developed in the previous G-FLOWS projects, combined with a variety of field evaluation techniques, to map the groundwater resources in the APY Lands.
The discovery of a new fresh groundwater resource (<1,000 mg/L) in the APY Lands has enormous potential for the future development of this remote region in outback South Australia. Availability of a high yielding groundwater resource within the
Lindsay East Palaeovalley could unlock the potential for economic development in the region.
Hydrogeol_utils: an open-source, data processing, integration and visualisation toolkit for hydrgeology
Neil Symington 1 , Mike Barnes 1
1. Geoscience Australia, Kingston, ACT, Australia
Groundwater science in Australia and internationally faces enormous challenges in the years and decades to come. Increasing water demand for agriculture, industry, domestic supply and the environment will put pressure on already stressed
groundwater systems. To manage our groundwater resources in the face of competing interests, regulators require transparent, reproducible and defensible science delivered in political timeframes to underpin decision making and
investment. Competing demands for groundwater resources will continue to politicise groundwater science, as demonstrated by controversies surrounding fracking and coal mining, which will result in continued public scrutiny.
The current scientific landscape presents enormous opportunities. Decreasing data acquisition, storage and computing costs and advances in computational sciences allows access to a larger volume and greater variety of data, which may greatly increase our ability to understand groundwater systems. However, processing, analysing and visualising these data is currently complicated by the proprietary and black-box components in many groundwater research workflows.
We propose open-source science, where data and methodologies are freely available, as the best approach to ensuring science is sufficiently transparent and reproducible to withstand both professional and public scrutiny. Open-source science also allows greater collaboration and sharing of ideas between groups, which reduces duplication of efforts and frees scientists to focus on their specific research. This is particularly advantageous in code development, which is important in extracting information from large data collections in realistic timeframes
92 | P a g e We present, hydrogeol_utils
(https://github.com/GeoscienceAustralia/hydrogeol_utils), a GitHub repository of python-based tools and workflows for processing, analysis, integration and
visualisation of hydrogeological data. This toolkit aims to provide a user-friendly Application Protocol Interface (API) for accessing analysis-ready hydrogeological and geophysical datasets stored in efficient, standardised and open formats (netCDF4 and Spatialite). It applies common scientific processes such as plotting, interpolating, filtering, exploratory analysis and modelling. A major focus of this package is in the integration of a range of datasets including airborne electromagnetics (AEM), surface nuclear magnetic resonance (SNMR) and borehole information (including wireline logs, water levels and lithology) to create maps and models and assess groundwater systems against management objectives.
The package utilises mature and powerful scientific computing packages including numpy, pandas and scipy for data analysis, matplotlib for visualisation, scikitlearn for machine learning techniques and rasterio,
shapely, xarray and gdal for spatial analysis. Workflows for calculating hydrological parameters including aquifer properties, groundwater salinity and water table depth are contained within Jupyter Notebooks, which are used to document the workflow including runnable code.
The Exploring for the Future web portal – democratising access to geoscience data, tools and information
Simon E. van der Wielen 1 , Edward Brown 1 , Deepika Mani 1 , Tony Aleksovski 1 , Callum McKenna 1 , Fabio Farina 1 , Geng Lang 1 , Lee Davidson 1 , Bill Farmakis 1 , Brian Hanisch 1 , Luke Wallace 1
1. Geoscience Australia, Symonston, ACT, Australia
The Exploring for the Future program is a four-year, $100.5 million initiative by the Australian Government dedicated to boosting investment in resource exploration and agriculture development in northern Australia. The region is underdeveloped and offers enormous potential for industry and agricultural development as well as being advantageously located close to major global markets.
The Exploring for the Future program comprises data acquisition using geophysical surveys, geochemical sampling, hydrological mapping and stratigraphic drilling. The data collected has been integrated to provide a holistic picture of the mineral, energy and groundwater resources. Data will be made publicly available via the Exploring for the Future web portal (https://eftf.ga.gov.au) that allows direct access to the data and tools to inform policy and planning decisions within government, resource sector and agribusiness. The portal has been designed with a human centric interface to allow a user with little prior knowledge to rapidly access information they require so that they can make informed data driven decisions about natural resources, including groundwater resources.
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Emerging Analytical & Numerical Methods
Modelling groundwater-surface water interactions with the Double- Averaged Navier Stokes Equations: a step towards next-generation tools for integrated limit setting
Andrew L. Dark 1 , John C. Bright 1
1. Aqualinc Research Ltd., Christchurch, New Zealand
Objectives: Existing coupled models for groundwater and surface water flows use different governing equations for the different components, making them reliant on numerical coupling methods that can be the source of instability and mass-balance errors. This is currently a barrier to their use in integrated limit-setting processes.
This project investigated the feasibility of resolving these issues by using a single system of equations for both surface and subsurface flows.
Design and Methodology: A 2D numerical model (a vertical slice) was developed to solve the Double-Averaged Navier Stokes (DANS) Equations (Nikora et al., 2007), using a finite-volume implementation. This allows the horizontal and vertical velocity components to be modelled over the depth of a stream and the underlying hyporheic zone or aquifer.
The most significant challenge in the development of the DANS numerical model was the implementation of a turbulence model that allows a transition between a
turbulent free-surface flow and laminar Darcian flow in the underlying porous medium. The model determines whether flows in the near-bed region are in a turbulent, non-linear laminar or Darcian regime, rather than specifying this a priori.
Results: Considering "book-end" scenarios (i.e. groundwater only; surface water only), the numerical model successfully reproduced analytical solutions and published experimental results. For the full groundwater - surface water case,
velocity and turbulent kinetic energy fields from the numerical model were compared to data from innovative particle-tracking experiments in a laboratory flume, using transparent beads as the porous medium. The following figures show velocity fields from the lab experiments (above) and the numerical model (below) for a "gaining stream" configuration.
94 | P a g e Features of the flows measured in the laboratory were well replicated by the
numerical model.
Conclusions: This project confirmed the technical feasibility of using the DANS Equations for modelling groundwater and surface water flows as one
system. Proposed further research will extend the model to 3D and improve the representation of processes such as the free surface, creating a model that can be used at a practical scale. Analogies between the turbulence transport equation used in the model and the governing equations for contaminant transport suggest that the model could be extended to model contaminant transport. The ability to model groundwater and surface water flows and transport in a single consistent
mathematical framework would be a substantial step forward in reducing the cost and complexity of quantifying interdependencies between water allocation and nutrient discharge limits.
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1. Nikora, V., McEwan, I., McLean, S., Coleman, S., Pokrajac, D. and Walters, R. (2007), Double-averaging concept for rough-bed open-channel and overland flows: Theoretical background. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering - ASCE, 133(8), 873-883.
Seepage analysis through the body and the vicinity of an earth water dam by using unstructured-mesh finite element modelling. The Mornos - dam case study
Panagiotis Giannoulopoulos 1 , Ilias Gerolymatos 2 1. Pennington Scott, Perth/Wembley, WA, Australia
2. EYDAP S.A., Geologist-Environmentalist, Athens, Greece
Analysis of groundwater flow through earth dams and embankments is commonly conducted by developing and running 2D-vertical profile numerical models along selected transects (Gikas and Sakellariou, 2008), assuming they are aligned with the major direction of groundwater flow, and negligible flow components at different directions.
This above approach seems to work sufficiently well for the majority of the problems, representing standard geometrical structures and simplified flow patterns. In
problems involving complex geometries and geological structures, the use of the 2D profile-modelling methodology fail to realistically represent the pattern and the dynamics of groundwater flow in the system.
The application of numerical models based on 3D-structured mesh, is burdened by several limitations and functional constraints that reduce their suitability in simplified cases. The requirement of large number of elements/cells in many different layers with significant number of redundant elements at pinch out parts, discretization difficulties in approaching key structural details, significant model run times, and convergence difficulties are few examples of the above limitations.
Recent developments of the industry-standard numerical code FEFLOW (Diersch ,2104, DHI, 2018), in the field of 3D-unstructured finite element mesh, proves to work sufficiently well in overcoming the above limitations, providing improved solutions in simulating groundwater flow systems with significant 3D flow components in complex geometrical structures.
This paper presents the application of 3D unstructured - mesh finite element
technique in simulating transient seepage of groundwater flow through the body and the vicinity of an earth water dam, in Mornos river catchment, Greece. This dam is 135m high and constitutes the major source of potable water supply of the
metropolitan area of Athens, Greece.
The model was designed to incorporate all the structural components of the dam and the surrounding bedrock. It was calibrated at transient state conditions, against monthly water level data observed at various piezometers installed at multiple locations in the body of the dam. The model was run for a simulation period of 30 years, replicating with sufficient accuracy the field observations and the anticipated patterns of groundwater flow. Potential impacts of preferential flow patterns and seepage through underlying bedrock fractures are discussed. Alternative model designs comprising traditional structured mesh as well as 2D profile modelling and the unstructured mesh technique are explored.
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Practical examples of numerical modelling techniques to inform groundwater impact assessments for major infrastructure projects
Rikito Gresswell 1
1. GHD, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Objective: Groundwater impact assessments for major projects rely on the outputs from numerical groundwater modelling to quantify potential project-induced changes to groundwater levels and fluxes. For major infrastructure projects, groundwater modellers are often required to accurately simulate the geometry of complex engineering structures and their interaction with the geology and hydrological features. Additionally, predictions are commonly required for stresses larger than those of the natural range of seasonal variations and for a period of time longer than the period of historical observations. This presentation provides practical examples of modelling techniques applied to assist with the preparation of Environmental Effects Statements for major infrastructure projects in Victoria.
Methodology: The presentation will draw on GHD’s recent experience with the following two projects:
1. Edithvale-Bonbeach Level Crossing Removal Project which will involve the construction of pile walls near Ramsar listed wetlands of high ecological importance.
2. Northeast Link Project which will involve the construction of 6 km long twin tunnels, mined tunnels and cut and cover excavations.
Data and results: The presentation will provide an overview of:
• The use of unstructured grids to accurately simulate the geometry of engineering structures, geology and hydrological features within regional model domains.
• Loose coupling of MODFLOW-USG with SOURCE to simulate interactions between groundwater and wetlands.
• Rigorous automated calibration in a highly parallelized computing environment using PEST_HP.
• Predictive uncertainty analysis based on PEST’s Null-Space Monte Carlo methodology.
• Climate change impact assessment using Victorian Government’s climate change guidelines, with benchmarking of the model against long term historical climate data.
Conclusion: Recent advances in modelling capabilities provide modellers with the opportunity to assess groundwater impacts in greater detail, including probabilistic outcomes that are particularly suited to the risk assessment framework adopted in major infrastructure projects.