xIntegrating geophysics, geology, and hydrology for improved groundwater and environmental management
In HyGEM project we are creating tools for the direct and automatic integration of spatially dense geophysical and sparse geological data to construct hydrological models for knowledge-based groundwater resource management. This includes:

1. Development of automatic methodologies for transforming spatially sampled geophysical data, using geological and hydrogeological data, to the framework of a hydrological model.
2. Use of geostatistical methods to describe the correlation between the geophysical data and lithological/hydrological data and to assess the uncertainties from the automatization.
3. Demonstrate the benefits of spatially distributed geophysical data for informing and updating groundwater models in terms of their increased predictive power.

The results have a significant scientific and societal impact given that the issues are of high interest in many research groups world-wide. The individual elements will bring substantial insight into integration - particularly automatized integration - of large geophysical datasets into groundwater models that today remains an unresolved conceptual and technical challenge.


 The project is founded by The Danish Council for Strategic Research

Work packages

The HyGEM project is divided into six Work Packages (WP), five of these being technical WPs and one dealing with dissemination and co-ordination.

In WP1 we are supplementing existing and collecting new hydrological and geophysical data as well as doing instrument developments. In WP2 the collected geophysical data are used as input for a direct geophysical three-dimensional voxel inversion. In WP3 the collected data supply valuable information to improve the descriptions of the statistical links between geophysical parameters and lithological/hydrological parameters. WP4 directly couple EM data with the groundbased MRS data in the context of hydrological parameters, and finally in WP5 the combined set of collected field data will help designing a test-bench environment analyzing the importance of the different data sets.

A detailed description of the five technical WPs can be found below.

WP1. Hydrological-geophysical mapping and method development.

WP2. Voxel inversion of geophysical data for improved hydrological integration.

WP3. Analysis of hydrological, lithological, and geophysical relationships.

WP4. Coupled three-dimensional hydrological and hydrogeophysical modeling.

WP5. Hydrological and geophysical test-bench modeling.

WP6. Dissemination and coordination.