Developing Groundwater Resources
Groundwater development involves locating and investigating the groundwater system, installation of wells, infrastructure or distribution, management and water rights. Groundwater occurs almost everywhere beneath the land surface, but not always in usable quantities. Therefore, investigating the resource is about determining if it can be extracted in useful quantities, determining aquifer characteristics, water quality, annual recharge, and sustainable extraction volumes.
Investigations begin with digging into available information which may adequately describe aquifer characteristics and water availability. It”s fairly common to find needed information for alluvial aquifers underlying valley floors. But once you get into remote or mountainous areas information tends to be sparse. In valley floor aquifers it may be sufficient to simply pick a spot and drill a well; doing the same in mountainous or bedrock areas is risky and unpredictable without first conducting some level of exploration. Exploration methods vary from simple field reconnaissance to use of geophysical methods.
For groundwater developments in aquifers where there is limited information, determining how much water is available and can be extracted on an ongoing and sustainable basis is essential. This commonly requires understanding how much annual recharge there is, how much is recoverable, how well buffered the system is against depletion, and how other users can be protected. For complex problems groundwater modeling or simulations are necessary.