Violeta Velasco

An integrated GIS-based tool for aquifer test analysis

AbstractThe quantification of the hydraulic parameters is important to support decision making in environmental impact assessment, water resources evaluation or groundwater contamination remediation, among others. These kind of parameters derived from aquifer tests usually encompasses a vast amount of data (spatial and non-spatial) for management and analysis. To achieve this in a clear and understandable manner, the GIS environment is a useful instrument. Development of innovative software to analyze pumping tests in a GIS platform environment to support the hydraulic parameterization of groundwater flow and transport models is presented in this paper. This new platform provides three interconnected modules to improve (a) pumping test interpretation code through a user-friendly interface, (b) pumping test data visualization supported by a set of tools that perform spatiotemporal queries in a GIS environment and (c) the storage and management of hydrogeological information. Additionally, within the GIS platform, it is possible to process the hydraulic parameters obtained from the pumping test and to create spatial distribution maps, perform geostatistical analysis and export the information to an external software platform. Finally, a real-world application in the area of Barcelona (Spain) has shown the usefulness of the tools developed in support of hydrogeological analysis.

A loosely coupled GIS and hydrogeological modeling framework

GIS technology gives a wide-ranging support to environmental modeling, especially to groundwater modeling. Numerous GIS applications have been developed to define the hydrogeological conceptual model as well as the numerical model. However, there is a scarcity of tools to implement the conceptual model in numerical modeling platforms. This transition needs of specific methodologies to adapt the geometries and alphanumerical data from the conceptual model to the numerical model to get optimal numerical results. Although most necessities can be satisfied with inherent GIS tools, there are particular steps in the implementation of hydrogeological conceptual model into the numerical modeling software that have not been automatized and put together yet. They are mostly related to finite element mesh generation. To overcome this gap, we present a set of tools, named ArcArAz, which focuses on the configuration of geometry and parameterization for groundwater numerical models, which can be used in other environmental sciences.

GIS-Based Software Platform for Managing Hydrogeochemical Data

A GIS-based software platform was developed to arrange all the available hydrogeochemical data into a comprehensive structure and provide support for its proper storage, management, analysis and interpretation. This platform is composed of a geospatial database and a set of analytical instruments integrated in a graphical user interface that coordinates its activities with several software. The geospatial database was specifically developed to store and manage organic and inorganic chemical records, as well as other physical parameters. The analytical tools cover a great range of methodologies for querying, comparing and interpreting groundwater quality parameters. This tools enable us to obtain automatically several calculations such as charge balance error and ionic ratios as well as calculations of various common hydrogeochemical diagrams (e.g. Schoeller-Berkaloff, Piper, Stiff) to which the spatial components are added. Moreover, it allows performing a complete statistical analysis of the data (e.g. generation of correlation matrix and bivariate analysis). Finally, this platform allows handling relevant auxiliary information in an efficient way, and it is coupled to a number of technologies such as hydrogeochemical modelling or geostatistical analysis. The software platform was used in a case study involving several urban aquifers located into the metropolitan area of Barcelona (Spain) to illustrate its performance.