The coastal regions of Pingtung Plain in southern Taiwan rely on groundwater as their main source of fresh water for aquaculture, agriculture, domestic, and industrial sectors. The availability of fresh groundwater is threatened by unsustainable groundwater extraction and the over-pumpage leads to the serious problem of seawater intrusion. It is desired to find appropriate management strategies to control groundwater salinity and mitigate seawater intrusion. In this study, a simulation-optimization model has been presented to solve the problem of seawater intrusion along the coastal aquifers in Pingtung Plain and the objective is using injection well barriers and minimizing the total injection rate based on the predetermined locations of injection barriers. The SEAWAT code is used to simulate the process of seawater intrusion and the surrogate model of artificial neural networks (ANNs) is used to approximate the seawater intrusion (SWI) numerical model to increase the computational efficiency during the optimization process. The heuristic optimization scheme of differential evolution (DE) algorithm is selected to identify the global optimal management solution. Two different management scenarios, one is the injection barriers located along the coast and the other is the injection barrier located at the inland, are considered and the optimized results show that the deployment of injection barriers at the inland is more effective to reduce total dissolved solids (TDS) concentrations and mitigate seawater intrusion than that along the coast. The computational time can be reduced by more than 98% when using ANNs to replace the numerical model and the DE algorithm has been confirmed as a robust optimization scheme to solve groundwater management problems. The proposed framework can identify the most reliable management strategies and provide a reference tool for decision making with regard to seawater intrusion remediation.

Changes in groundwater level during earthquakes have been reported worldwide. In this study, field observations of co-seismic groundwater-level changes in wells under different aquifer conditions and sampling intervals due to near-field earthquake events in Taiwan are presented. Sustained changes, usually observed immediately after earthquakes, are found in the confined aquifer. Oscillatory changes due to the dynamic strain triggered by passing earthquake waves can only be recorded by a high-frequency data logger. While co-seismic changes recover rapidly in an unconfined aquifer, they can sustain for months or longer in a confined aquifer. Three monitoring wells with long-term groundwaterlevel data were examined to understand the association of coseismic changes with local hydrogeological conditions. The finite element software ABAQUS is used to simulate the porepressure changes induced by the displacements due to fault rupture. The calculated co-seismic change in pore pressure is related to the compressibility of the formation. The recovery rate of the change is rapid in the unconfined aquifer due to the hydrostatic condition at the water table, but slow in the confined aquifer due to the less permeable confining layer.Fracturing of the confining layer during earthquakes may enhance the dissipation of pore pressure and induce the discharge of the confined aquifer. The study results indicated that aquifer characteristics play an important role in determining groundwater-level changes during and after earthquakes.

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