2D-ERT monitoring of soil moisture seasonal behaviour in a river levee: A case study

Abstract

We present a study of the seasonal behaviour of soil moisture in an old embankment levee by means of 2D DC-electrical resistivity tomography monitoring based on an embedded electrode installation. We were able to produce seasonal resistivity change models that are compensated for temperature effects using a seasonal temperature profile model. Time-lapse sections of percentage resistivity changes show spatial and temporal overall consistency with seasonal variations of soil temperature. Discrepancies are likely due to the pavement layer that is not well considered in the inversion process as well as to time-lapse inversion pitfalls. Furthermore, a detailed estimation of seasonal moisture content variations could not be given as an accurate calibration of the employed suction probes was not achievable. Nevertheless, the levee appears to have spatially consistent time variations in soil moisture, clearly influenced by both rainfall and water table and river levels. Future work on developing 3D acquisitions and adding embedded moisture content probes should prove effective to our monitoring design and give a more detailed understanding of the soil moisture seasonal behaviour in the studied stretch of levee.

Time-Lapse Electrical Resistivity Tomography (TL-ERT) for Landslide Monitoring: Recent Advances and Future Directions

“…In the last 20 years, more than 200 papers have been published on ISI journals (Figure 1). The TL-ERT method found an impressive number of applications crossing different disciplines, from hydrogeology [9][10][11][12] to agriculture [13][14][15][16], from engineering geology [17][18][19][20] to geohazards [21][22][23][24], from CO2 storage [25] to the study of the effects of the climate changes on soil and near subsurface [26][27][28][29].…”

Application of non-invasive geophysical methods (GPR and ERT) to locate the ancient foundations of the first cathedral of Puebla, Mexico. A case study

“…The Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), for instance, has proven to be an efficient method to determine the thickness of buried structures, whether natural or anthropic, such as crypts or tombs, or to detect boundaries between different building materials (Goodman, D., 1994;Carcione, J.M., 1996;Jol, 2009;Johnston et al, 2018;Yalçıner, 2019). Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) has also been successfully tested in archaeological surveys due to its high sensitivity (Gündgdu, et al, 2017;Jodry et al 2019).…”

An assessment of ERT as a method to monitor water content regime in flood embankments: The case study of the Adige River embankment

“…This technique has been acknowledged as a valuable tool for monitoring water flow in flood prone areas (Brunet, et al, 2010) and it has recently found applications in the monitoring of water content in flood embankments. It can be conveniently implemented to investigate seasonal variations of water regime as a permanent monitoring system by burying the electrodes in the soil and transferring the data remotely, to correlate water content variation to weather events and parameters (Tresoldi, et al, 2019); (Jodry, et al, 2019).…”

“…Interpretation of ERT results can be complicated and affected by uncertainties for several reasons, including anomalies in the resistivity due to improper contact between electrodes and ground surface (Jodry, et al, 2019), numerical artefacts generated during the inversion process and effects of three-dimensional structures in the survey areas which cannot be accounted for in a two-dimensional model (Hojat, et al, 2020). Moreover the resistivity values are influenced by other variables (e.g.…”