Hydrogeophysical monitoring system

There are over 350 thousand contaminated sites in the US which will require cleanup by both government and private industry in the next twenty years. The total cost of this environmental site cleanup is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Amongst federal agencies the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Department of Defense (DoD) have the largest cleanup liabilities which amount to tens of billions of dollars each. Monitoring is recognized as an essential part of all phases of site cleanup. Monitoring informs both initial site characterization, the remedial effort and post remedial efforts. Current approaches to monitoring consume a substantial part of remediation budgets and are not always sufficient to provide the actionable information required to support efficient site cleanup. Electrical geophysical monitoring systems could provide for better and lower cost monitoring solutions, but current tools do not allow for a widespread and robust application of electrical geophysical monitoring to contaminated sites. A hydro geophysical monitoring software package (HGM) will be developed and validated. This software package will provide an integrated solution for all aspects of electrical geophysical monitoring, including survey design and acquisition geometry generation, data acquisition and transmission, data management and quality assurance/quality control (qa/qc), data preprocessing and inversion and result visualization. This software will integrate with decision support software to provide stakeholders with a comprehensive, robust and cost efficient solution. In Phase I and Phase II the software will be developed and validated against currently ongoing monitoring efforts in collaboration with DOE scientists. The software will be integrated with a DOE developed inversion code. Capabilities for survey planning, data capture and advanced data processing and linkage to reactive transport models will be implemented and field tested. The software will be applicable to numerous monitoring needs in the private and public sector, including site remediation, water resources and unconventional energy. It will provide a low cost, auditable and reliable solution to site monitoring which will substantially lower taxpayer liabilities for site remedial efforts.