Technology Integration for Sustainable Ground Water Management and Water Resource Protection

Advancements in disparate technologies are presenting opportunities for scientists and engineers to increase the quality and reduce the costs associated with ground water management issues.  Real-time analyses and long-term monitoring can be handled more efficiently by taking advantage of technologic developments in several areas.  First, the advancement of geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), database, and web technologies are automating the acquisition, storage, and real-time access to billions of historic data records.  Second, the remote sensing industry is providing new probes that can measure and record important water parameters and new telemetric capabilities that enable cellular and web-based access.  Third, data analysis and visualization software are becoming more interactive and sophisticated using hydrogeologic equations such as linear-log kriging and non-linear well loss components to enable more precise data interpolations around extraction and injection well fields.  This paper will present a synopsis of these technologies by demonstrating the import, query, and visualization of pressure-transducer and GIS data for municipal and industrial water-supply systems.  Improvements in the energy and water-resource management of ground-water supply systems from advanced monitoring and visualization have been achieved by integration of these technologies on several case studies.