Ground Water Monitoring

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PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

Category

• Topographic information
• Impact assessment
• Change detection / continuous monitoring
• Land cover / use
• Near surface geology

• Surface deformation
• Precision ortho-images
• Terrain information
• Water quantity & quality

Uses

• Monitoring of ground water levels
• Impact assessment
• Environmental monitoring – Baseline historic mapping of environment and ecosystems
• Environmental monitoring – Continuous monitoring of changes throughout the lifecycle

Challenges addressed

• Permitting Process – Water catchment
• Development and Operations – Environmental Monitoring

Geo-information needs

• P-2: Groundwater
• DO-22: Ground water monitoring

Description

Ground water monitoring in respect of water level as well as chemistry is an important task in terms of impact assessment of the mining activities on the environment. It is quite challenging to meet these needs with remote sensing data. Remote sensing may indirectly address those issues by providing several indicators. This product provides several indicators that are addressed with gravimetry as well as interferometry techniques.

Changes in the Earth’s gravitational field are detected with satellite imagery and furthermore indicate movement and changes within ground water. These changes indicate variations in water storage and further make it possible to calculate variations in volume.

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) imagery is used to detect changes in land surface and altitude. Satellite images from several points in time make it possible to observe changes. As the depletion of ground water leads to ground subsidence, the derived information indicate this. The product shows the ground water level and indicate changes and anomalies when examining time series.

Known restrictions / limitations

As mentioned above, monitoring of ground water level as well as chemistry is a challenging task that can only be addressed indirectly by remote sensing at the moment.

NASA’s GRACE missions provide data on Earth’s gravitational field and could thus be a measure of volumetric ground water. However, resolution is not as high as desirable. The first GRACE mission (2002–2017) provided a resolution of 300 km, the follow-up mission, GRACE-FO, launched in 2018, now provides a resolution of 100 km.

Lifecycle stage and demand

Exploration

Environmental Assessment and Permitting

Design, Construction and Operations

Mine Closure and Aftercare

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Environmental Assessment & Permitting:

• Information to minimise the impact of mining activities on the environment

Design, Construction & Operations:

• Information to monitor impacts on the environment
• Information on ground water level

Mine Closure & Aftercare:

• Information to monitor impacts on the environment after mine closure

Geographic coverage

EARSC Thematic Domain

Domain

PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS

Input data sources

Commercial, on demand

Commercial, on demand

Commercial, on demand

Website

Minimum Mapping Unit (MMU)

Variable, depending on source data resolution.

Accuracy / constraints

Thematic accuracy:

N/A

Spatial accuracy:

Dependent on input pixel resolution

Accuracy assessment approach & quality control measures

N/A

Frequency / timeliness

Observation frequency:

Every one or more days, depending on satellite.

Timeliness of delivery:

Within five (working) days of sensing.

Availability

Data from all Sentinel satellites are freely available through the open data policy of the operator ESA (Sentinel-1A since 2014, Sentinel-1B since 2016).

Delivery / output format

Data type: Raster formats

File format: Geotiff

Further delivery formats: Paper maps, Statistical change report

USE CASE