Hydrogeologist@work

Droge kost, innoveren op droogte en watertekorten

geocheryl — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:00:11 +0000

Ik heb mogen meewerken aan een inspiratieboekje van Deltares en Rijkswaterstaat. Zeer toepasselijk in de huidige droogte waar NL onder gebukt gaat!

Het waterbeheer in Nederland is op hoofdlijnen op orde. We zijn veilig en we hebben voldoende en relatief schoon water. Met het oog op de klimaatverandering, zeespiegelstijging en bodemdaling is het echter de vraag of dat zo blijft. De meest recente klimaatscenario’s geven aan dat er in Nederland in de toekomst vaker aanhoudend droge, warme zomers kunnen optreden die aanleiding geven tot watertekorten. Maar dat het niet iets is wat uitsluitend in de toekomst speelt, hebben de zomers van 1976 en 2003 ons geleerd. Het is van belang dat we onze waterhuishouding met het oog op toekomstige ontwikkelingen op orde hebben.

Problemen op het gebied van veiligheid, zoetwatervoorziening, verzilting en een veranderend watergebruik vragen om nieuwe oplossingen. Daarbij zijn creativiteit en innovatief denken sleutelwoorden. Op initiatief van Waterinnovatie Rijkswaterstaat Waterdienst en Deltares (WINN) is vanuit het thema ‘Droogte’ een inspiratieboekje voor droogte-innovaties samengesteld. Het boekje schetst een palet aan innovatieve maatregelen die kunnen inspireren om de droogteproblematiek te lijf te gaan. Het inspiratieboekje streeft geen compleetheid na, maar geeft een korte bloemlezing van concrete en minder concrete ideeën.

Download het boekje

Earthquakes and Tsunamis

geocheryl — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 17:00:44 +0000

A friend sent me the link to the following site of RSOE EDIS just a few days before the earthquake and Tsunami hit Japan on March 11th 2011.

as they say: “Nothing happens unexpectedly, everything has an indication, we just have to observe the connections.”

RSOE EDIS helps to monitor (environmental) emergencies around the world. This is what Japan was looking like the day after the event:

Who has the answers to your water issues?

geocheryl — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:59:53 +0000

Watch this movie and see how the Netherlands deal with water in a changing world. Very inspiring!

Thermodynamics and marketing

geocheryl — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 09:40:30 +0000

Ah, how I always loved thermodynamics. I was thrilled because I recognized the laws of thermo in social and other our-scale phenomena. I meant to write a blog about this some time, but here’s a TED talk about a similar subject:

Deltares Views nr. 2

geocheryl — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 07:42:41 +0000

It’s been out for a time, but I just discovered the digital version. Seems that a colleague is putting all kinds of Deltares folders and magazines online. So, if you’ve always been wondering about what my company exactly does around the world:

Deltares views nr 2 2009

View more presentations from Marcel Bruggers.

Oil spill map

geocheryl — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:49:47 +0000

NOAA publishes a 3-day projection for the trajectory of the Oil Spill plume and ESRI makes this available for anyone to publish an online map. Hereunder I show this trajectory with local tourism revenue.

Make your own map at http://mapapps.esri.com/disasters/create-map/oil-spill-econ/index.html

New Technologies for Aquifer assessment

geocheryl — Fri, 07 May 2010 07:31:44 +0000

On the 15th and 16th of april, IGRAC and UNESCO-IHP organized an international workshop in Utrecht on new technologies and alternative information sources for conducting global assessments of transboundary aquifers (TBAS).

The workshop was organized in the context of a global Transboundary Water Assessment Program (TWAP) planned by the Global Environment Facility (GEF, Worldbank). IGRAC is developing this assessment together with some of the workshop’s participants. 35 renowned water experts of various international organizations and from different government and private sectors discussed how certain ‘modern’ technologies can contribute to global groundwater assessments.

Topics

The workshop considered groundwater in its socio-economic and environmental context. Special attention was further given to Remote Sensing and Airborne Geophysics; Global Change Modeling (GCM); methods for estimating groundwater demand, use, storage and change (using GRACE satellite imagery), water footprints, water valuing, water quality and the necessity of in-situ measurements.

The workshop showed that the ‘modern’ methods and models can add valuable complementary information to in-situ data. However, the latter will always be important to collect as it is necessary to validate, calibrate and ground-truth those ‘modern’ methods.

During the workshop some major international programs in global groundwater assessment (WHYMAP, IGRAC’s GGMN and GEO ) showed how they contribute to international data integration and sharing. Data availability and ownership were important recurring themes throughout the workshop.

Data availability & stakeholders

With respect to data availability, the workshop formed a platform to once again voice the need for more new data and for improving the availability of existing data. It was put forward that the need for access to more data is shared by more stakeholders than normally accounted for: stakeholders in groundwater data actually include 1) government institutions, including ministries; 2) non-profit institutions working at global scales, such as UNESCO, the Worldbank and IGRAC; 3) climate and hydrogeological scientists modeling at local and global scales 4) the private sector, including industry, farmers and the energy sector; 5) indiviuals at the household level.

The data need of all of these stakeholders could be used as an incentive to get them to participate in the data generating processes at global scales. The workshop was successful at bringing some of these stakeholders closer together, by giving more insight in how each approached groundwater, data management and ownership, and where synergies could be found.

The workshop also showed that a lot of data and overview maps actually exist, but must be pulled together, aggregated, integrated and most of all: be made available.

Data ownership

It was made clear that most groundwater data is owned by government departments, and not by the institutions who measure the data in the first place. These government departments subsequently determine whether data becomes available (as in the Netherlands and Austrialia) or is locked away in a closet (as in most other countries). In the EU, international regulation has proven valuable in opening up these closets.

It should further be noted that a lot of data on the sub-surface was acquired by the mining industry and thus is owned by mining departments. Groundwater departments of the same government often do not have access to this data. Sometimes they don’t even know of its existence.

A successful workshop

All in all, the workshop was experienced as a great success by both the participants and organizers. The discussions were fruitful at giving input for the conference’s objective (developing a global TBA assessment methodology), but beyond that it also laid bare some other concrete findings, namely

where synergies exist between different stakeholders;
which issues are recurring throughout different assessment methodologies (scale and uncertainty);
why certain modern methods are not extensively used in the groundwater sector yet and how this could be changed; and finally
where steps to improve international data availability should be taken, namely at a national level and by improving collaboration between government departments.

Participants of the workshop included BGR, Deltares, ETH-Zurich,FAO, Fugro, GEF, IGRAC, PBL, Shell, Twente University, UNEP, UNESCO, University of Arizona, University of Frankfurt, University of Texas, Utrecht University, Vitens and WaterWatch.

World Water Day: Water for a healthy world

geocheryl — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 14:28:52 +0000

April 22nd was World Water day. This year’s theme was Clean Water for a Healthy World. In other words, water quality. For the occasion, IGRAC sent out a newsletter to its network. Those interested can still read it online:

IGRAC’s most notable contributions to global groundwater quality assessments are the recent global assessment of saline and brackish groundwater and the Fluoride and Arsenic assessments done by Slavek Vasak. Slavek also contributed a chapter on Fluoride to the IHP and UNESCO book Sustainable Groundwater Resources, which was published only recently.

Those who are interested in groundwater monitoring, or are looking for guidelines and protocols, can find more information in IGRAC’s MIM system and several reports.
For more information:

Science 2.0

geocheryl — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:43:03 +0000

here’s for somthing new: prepublishing posts.

Here’s the information I would like to write a post on. however, by lack of time, here are only the bits and peaces of inspiration:

http://scienceblogs.com/
http://sciencecommons.org/
http://friendfeed-media.com/add2650f26799a4a98fb65371b92a80b6b61259a
http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0
http://cameronneylon.net/blog/friendfeed-for-research-first-impressions-of-sciencefeed/
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-future-of-science-2/

IGRAC at IW:Science Conference in Macao

geocheryl — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:52:51 +0000

Frank van Weert attended the First Technical Working Meeting – â€˜Science in Global Environment Facility International Waters: A Vast and Powerful Resource’

The first technical working meeting of the Global Environmental FacilityÂ IW:Science project, referred to in full as â€˜Enhancing the use of Science in International Waters projects to improve project results’, will be held in Macao, co-hosted by UNU-INWEH,UNU-IISTand theMacao Polytechnic Institutefrom the 25th – 28th January 2010. The conference will see around 100 scientists, experts across a broad range of fields and GEF project people converge from all over the world to begin the first-ever analysis and synthesis of science within the GEF International Waters portfolio.

With over $US 4 billion invested in to date, GEF International Waters projects are designed to help countries to deal with concerns in all types of transboundary water systems, ranging from river basins, lake basins, and groundwater systems, to coasts and large marine ecosystems and the open ocean. The GEF IW:Science project aims to recognize, capture, analyze and integrate the scientific findings from these projects and to disseminate them across the IW portfolio and beyond.

A specifically-constructed knowledge management model, the Scientific Learning Network, is being developed for the project, facilitating the searching and extraction of information within the IW portfolio at a detail not possible before combined with interactive communication and knowledge sharing tools.

This UNEPÂ implemented project is being executed by UNU-INWEH

More information

Groundwater abstraction measured by GRACE

geocheryl — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:35:47 +0000

Although a lot of people have their reserves, GRACE’s star seems on the rise.

GRACE is the name of two satellites which orbit the earth, the one following the other. The Earth’s gravity field pulls the satellites towards earth, constantly slightly changing their distance to earth. The second satellites registers the movements of the first, and so in this way the gravity field of earth can be calculated.

Now, it is said that with GRACE one can monitor changes in groundwater storage. However, there are a lot of factors one still needs to filter out of the orriginal GRACE data. This is the reason why there is also a lot of scepticism about GRACE’s reliability for such exercises.

The following article reports on the work of Famiglietti of Irvine University, California. Famiglietti analysed monthly data for 6 years of GRACE data (2002 – 2008) and found startling results concerning India’s groundwater reserves. read more at sciencedaily.com

FEWS course

geocheryl — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:35:39 +0000

I just did a FEWS introduction/configuration course.

FEWS stands for Flood Early Warning System. The title refers to the software’s orriginal function. By now, FEWS is applicable to a lot more issues than just flood early warning and it seems quite powerful to me.

“Delft-FEWS provides an open shell system for managing forecasting processes and/or handling time series data.” This means FEWS provides a graphical interface for automating data management. For example, you can makeÂ FEWSÂ download new satellite data every day or hour, send this to a flooding or other type of forecasting model, and then send the output to a new location which serves it to the web. Just an example.

Â Fews is free to use, under license. It is built in a modular approach, using XML for information transfer between different modules. The configuration course therefore largerly consisted of learning where to mannipulate which xml to get a certain change in the shell. Are you following? Let’s just say that the xml allows you to tell FEWS to “show me a map of the Netherlands, zoomed in on Utrecht with all data available for groundwater levels in the period 1950 to 2000, ow. If there’s no data, than extrapolate it from earlier values, but write it in red!” Man, don’t you love smart programs??

Â Learn more about Delft-FEWS from the Deltares Public Wiki
or from wldelft

Global Overview of Saline Groundwater Occurrence and Genesis

geocheryl — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:35:04 +0000

The IGRAC recently published a draft report on saline groundwater occurrence and genesis. To accommodate this report, they expanded their site, giving an elaborate abstract of the report. The report is the result of extensive research done throughout 2008 and 2009. The report in which this culminated is only a draft, because IGRAC still wishes to receive comments of local experts.

My part in this work was to ‘finalize’ the GIS andÂ mapsÂ accompanying the report. I am still working on regional maps which will include topography andÂ cities from ESRI’s Data & Maps product.Â

You can now download the report and maps from the IGRAC website:

Groundwater & web 2.0

geocheryl — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:39:11 +0000

In January of 2009 I made the following presentation.
I recently placed it on slideshare.

Groundwater 2.0 on SlideShareÂ Â Â

View more OpenOffice presentations from geocheryl.

the latest literature – georeferenced!

geocheryl — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:07:27 +0000

Lately I have dug into mashups. A book on the subject brought under my attentionÂ YahooÂ Pipes. An easy to use RSS manipulater for non-programmers, the web 2.0 generation, and anybody who misses building stuff with lego blocks. Introduced as an easy way to build your first mashup, I actually found it quite challenging to use. But, it did allow me to create something I have had in mind for quite some time:

We want to keep up to date with the latest literature right? But often, we are only interested in literature for one specific area. The location we are researching. So how cool would it be not to need to read the (often unreadable and boringly long) titles of rss feeds, but just give a quick glance on a map and directly know whether any new scientific literature was publishedÂ about our area of interest ??!

Yahoo Pipes now makes this a piece of cake.

This is how it works: Yahoo pipes takes in RSS feeds. As many as you want to pipe to it (but it gets a bit slow with the more it gets to process). These RSS feeds can be mixed up together, sorted and filtered however you want. In addition to that, It can check the titles and abstracts of the feeds to find geolocations! Geolocations are pretty much all the locations which Google maps or Yahoo mapsÂ succeed to find, if you type in the word/name inÂ their search boxes. Now the best thing is, that once Yahoo pipes has analyzed your compiled RSS feed for geolocations, it automatically makes a Yahoo Map with all the feeds pinpointed in it. You can click them to see your titles (or whatever you have ordered the pipe to display).

THere is just one drawback: It seems that the pipe fails if there are too many RSS elements which cannot be georeferenced by lack of a geolocation in the title… THe good thing is however, With new RSS input, and new locations, it also seemds start working again … automatically!

Â Not perfect, but still great. Check it out in my geoweb section, and on Yahoo Pipes!

Transboundary Aquifers of the World

geocheryl — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 07:58:51 +0000

At the 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul IGRAC presented a new map of Transboundary Aquifers of the World.Â An earlier map with the same theme was published in 2006 by BGR in the WHYMAP framework.

The new map is a great improvement to the earlier one, as at that time the only way to indicate the aquifer’s location and extent was by using ovals and circles. This led to the funny misconception amongst some laymen Â that aquifers are always circular or oval!

So, this time, the Transboundary Aqfuiers (TBA) map depicts the actual location of the aquifer boundaries. For as far (publicly)Â known, and for as accurately we can represent them on a global mapÂ with scale of 1 : 50 000 000 at the equator.

The GIS editing was done by me and my colleague Joseph Reckman. The text on the back was edited both by us and Frank van Weert, Slavek Vasak and Neno Kukuric.

The map was based on several data sources depictingÂ regional TBA information. For some of these, IGRAC already had GIS information, for others paper maps had to be digitized and georeferenced.