Airborne electromagnetic mapping of subsurface brine, Brookhaven Oil Field, Mississippi

Smith, Bruce D.; Plesha, Joseph L.; Horton, Robert J.

doi:10.1190/1.1822084

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…There the objective was to provide rapid reconnaissance of hundreds of square miles, generally followed by land-based geophysical surveys of promising anomalies. Recently, traditional aerial methods have been used with success for environment site characterization (Doll et al, 1993, Smith et al, 1992, but many environmental sites are too small to justify the cost associated with helicopter-based geophysics. For sites smaller than a few hundred acres, cheaper and higher-resoluti_Jndata can be obtained using land-based methods.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A “Model” Geophysics Program

Nyquist¹

1994

Symposium on the Application of Geophysics to Engineering and Environmental Problems 1994

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In 1993, I tested a radio-controlledairplane designed by Jim Walker of Brigham Young University for low-elevation aerial photography. Model-air photography retains most of the advantages of standard aerial photography-the photographs can be used to detect lineaments, to map roads and bualdings,and to construct stereo pairs to measure topography-and it is far less expensive. Proven applications on the Oak Ridge Reservation include: updating older aerial records to document new construction; using repeated overflights of the same area to capture seasonal changes in vegetation and the effects of major storms; and detecting waste trench boundaries from the color and character of the overlying grass. Aerial photography is only one of many possible applications of radio-controlled aircraft. Currently, I am funded by the Department of Energy's Office of Technology Development to review the state of the art in microavionics, both military and civilian, to determine ways this emerging technology can be used for environmental site characterization. Being particularly interested in geophysical applications, I am also collaborating with electrical engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to design a model plane that will carry a 3-component flux-gate magnetometer and a global positioning system, which I hope to test in the spring of 1994.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A “Model” Geophysics Program

Nyquist¹

1994

Symposium on the Application of Geophysics to Engineering and Environmental Problems 1994

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The AEM method is particularly advantageous for watershed to regional-scale salinity studies as it provides high-resolution resistivity information with greater spatial coverage than is practically feasible with well data or ground-based geophysical surveys. AEM surveys have been used to evaluate groundwater salinity for various hydrogeologic scenarios that include studies of coastal aquifers and saltwater intrusion (Christensen & Halkjaer, 2014;Delsman et al, 2018;Faneca Sànchez et al, 2012;Fitterman & Deszcz-Pan, 1998;Goebel et al, 2019;Haider et al, 2015;Jørgensen et al, 2012;Kirkegaard et al, 2011;Schamper et al, 2013;Siemon et al, 2015;Teatini et al, 2011;Viezzoli et al, 2010), salinity mapping in irrigated and arid regions (Cresswell et al, 2004;Cresswell et al, 2007;, the location of brines Dugan et al, 2015), and the shallow occurrence of produced water from oil and gas production (Paine, 2003;Paine et al, 1997;Paine & Collins, 2003;Smith et al, 1992;Thamke & Smith, 2014). equations in light of other hydrogeologic properties can be assessed (e.g., Gillespie, Davis, Stephens, et al, 2019;Stephens et al, 2019).…”

Section: Salinity Mapping Using Aem Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Probabilistic Categorical Groundwater Salinity Mapping From Airborne Electromagnetic Data Adjacent to California's Lost Hills and Belridge Oil Fields

Ball

Davis

Minsley

et al. 2020

Water Resources Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Growing water stress has led to emerging interest in protecting fresh and brackish groundwater as a potential supplement to water supplies and raised questions about factors that could affect the future quality of fresh and brackish aquifers. Limited well infrastructure, particularly in regions where elevated salinity has led to limited historical groundwater development, hinders traditional mapping of salinity distributions through groundwater sampling. This paper presents a quantitative salinity mapping approach of the upper 300 m using high-resolution, regionally comprehensive resistivity models derived from Bayesian inversion of an airborne electromagnetic survey adjacent to the Lost Hills and Belridge oil fields in the southwestern San Joaquin Valley of California. Using local water quality observations as an interpretational foundation, a probabilistic approach yields maps of fresh, saline, and brackish groundwater while quantifying joint uncertainty inherited from the geophysical data and interpretational relations. Saline and fresh regions are mapped with relatively high confidence in many locations, while areas of lower confidence, particularly at depth, can be mapped as their most probable salinity category while reflecting the relative uncertainty in the interpretation. These maps identify a stratified salinity structure, where saline water commonly occurs in the surficial aquifer overlying fresher groundwater in the Tulare aquifer, separated by regional confining clay layers. Downgradient of unlined surface water diversions, recharge of imported surface water results in relatively fresh groundwater throughout the depth of investigation. Plain Language Summary Salinity, a measure of salt concentration, can impact the potential use of groundwater. Salinity can be difficult to map using wells alone, especially where groundwater development has been limited in the past. Dissolved salts are excellent conductors of electricity, and resistivity measurements are commonly used to estimate salinity where wells are not available. Uncertainty in estimating salinity from resistivity data can be introduced into the interpretation by two sources: (1) how well we can estimate salinity from resistivity and (2) how accurately we can measure resistivity. We present a method for mapping salinity that accounts for both sources of uncertainty using regional-scale, high-resolution airborne geophysical data, leading to spatially comprehensive 3-D maps of likely fresh (low salt) and saline (high salt) groundwater. The method is applied in the southwestern San Joaquin Valley of California adjacent to the Lost Hills and Belridge oil fields. Shallow groundwater is shown to have relatively high salinity in much of the study area, and a clay layer protects lower salinity water in the underlying Tulare aquifer. Leaking surface water canals have imported relatively fresh water into the area, resulting in fresher groundwater downgradient of the canals.

show abstract

“…; Siemon ), saltwater rises (e.g., Jordan and Siemon ) and contaminations (e.g., Smith et al . ; Paine et al . ; Siemon et al .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A review of helicopter‐borne electromagnetic methods for groundwater exploration

Siemon

Christiansen

Auken

2009

Near Surface Geophysics

244

144

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For about three decades, airborne electromagnetic (AEM) systems have been used for groundwater exploration purposes. Airborne systems are appropriate for large-scale and efficient groundwater surveying. Due to the dependency of the electrical conductivity on both the clay content of the host material and the mineralization of the water, electromagnetic systems are suitable for providing information about the aquifer structures and water quality, respectively.More helicopter than fixed-wing systems are used in airborne groundwater surveys. Helicopterborne frequency-domain electromagnetic (HEM) systems use a towed rigid-boom. Helicopterborne time-domain (HTEM) systems, which use a large transmitter loop and a small receiver within or above the transmitter, are generally designed for mineral exploration purposes but recent developments have made some of these systems usable for groundwater purposes as well.The quantity measured, the secondary magnetic field, depends on the subsurface conductivity distribution. Due to the skin-effect, the penetration depths of the AEM fields depend on the system characteristics used: high-frequency data/early-time channels describe the shallower parts of the conducting subsurface and the low-frequency data/late-time channels the deeper parts. Typical investigation depths range from some ten metres (conductive grounds) to several hundred metres (resistive grounds), where the HEM systems are appropriate for shallow to medium deep (about 1-100 m) and the HTEM systems for medium deep to deep (about 10-400 m) investigations.Generally, the secondary field values are inverted into resistivities and depths using homogeneous or layered half-space models. As the footprint of AEM systems is rather small, one-dimensional interpretation of AEM data is sufficient in most cases and single-site inversion procedures are widely used. Laterally constrained inversion of AEM data often improves the stability of the inversion models, particularly for noisy data. Higher dimensional inversion is still not possible for standard-size surveys.Based on typical field examples the advantages as well as the limitations of AEM surveys compared to long-established ground-based geophysical methods used in groundwater surveys are discussed. In a case history from a German island an airborne frequency-domain system is used to successfully locate freshwater lenses on top of saltwater. An example from Denmark shows how a timedomain system is used to locate large-scale buried structures forming ideal groundwater aquifers. ity on a) the salinity of the groundwater, i.e., the groundwater quality, and b) the clay content of the subsurface, i.e., the aquifer conditions and protection level (e.g., Kirsch 2006).The application of geoelectrical and electromagnetic methods on ground (e.g., McNeill 1990;Binley and Kemna 2005;Everett and Meju 2005;Ernstson and Kirsch 2006) has a long tradition in groundwater exploration. AEM, however, was introduced for mineral exploration and -compared to that -airborne groundwater exploration is ...

show abstract

Airborne electromagnetic mapping of subsurface brine, Brookhaven Oil Field, Mississippi

Cited by 10 publications

References 4 publications

A “Model” Geophysics Program

A “Model” Geophysics Program

Probabilistic Categorical Groundwater Salinity Mapping From Airborne Electromagnetic Data Adjacent to California's Lost Hills and Belridge Oil Fields

A review of helicopter‐borne electromagnetic methods for groundwater exploration

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About