HR: 0800h
AN: G51C-0628    [Abstracts]
TI: The Use of Permanent Scatterer InSAR in the Detection and Analysis of Aquifer-System Response to Long-Term and Seasonal Pumping and Recharge
AU: * Bell, J W
EM: jbell@unr.edu
AF: Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557, United States
AU: Amelung, F
EM: famelung@rsmas.miami.edu
AF: Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, Miami, FL 33149, United States
AU: Ferretti, A
EM: alessandro.ferretti@treuropa.com
AF: Tele-Rilevamento Europa, Via Vittoria Colonna 7, Milan, 20149, Italy
AB: The application of interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) studies to hydrogeological problems has advanced rapidly during the last decade, and it is now applied routinely to a wide range of groundwater resource issues including aquifer-system response and resource management. Permanent scatterer InSAR (PSInSAR^TM) provides a new high-resolution methodology for detecting and precisely measuring long-term and seasonal aquifer-system response to pumping and recharge. In contrast to the conventional InSAR methodology, the permanent scatterer (PS) methodology utilizes coherent radar phase data from thousands of individual radar reflectors on the ground to develop displacement time series and to produce velocity field maps that depict time-dependent aquifer-system response with a high degree of spatial detail. In this study, we present the results of a prototype study in Las Vegas Valley, Nevada, that demonstrate how the PS methodology can be utilized in heavily pumped groundwater basins of the arid western US to analyze aquifer- system response to long-term and seasonal pumping. We used 50 ERS-satellite and 19 ENVISAT-satellite acquisitions to develop a series of velocity field maps of the valley for the 1992-1996, 1996-2000, and 2003-2005 time periods that were then compared to water-level change data for the same time periods. The PS results show that despite rising water levels associated with an artificial recharge program, long-term, residual, inelastic aquifer-system compaction (subsidence) is continuing in several parts of the valley. In other areas of rapidly recovering water levels, however, long-term subsidence has been arrested and locally reversed as long-term elastic recovery of the aquifer-system occurs. In addition, the short-term, seasonal, elastic responses to alternating pumping and recharge cycles were segregated from the long-term trends and analyzed for spatial and temporal patterns. The results show oscillations in which the maximum seasonal responses are associated with the late stages of the annual artificial recharge cycles, and that similar seasonal subsidence signals are related to summer pumping cycles. This differentiation of the seasonal response through the use of PS time series data further allows the estimation of elastic and inelastic skeletal storage coefficients, providing a basis for future work that could characterize the storage properties of an aquifer system with a high degree of spatial resolution.
DE: 1211 Non-tectonic deformation
DE: 1240 Satellite geodesy: results (6929, 7215, 7230, 7240)
DE: 1828 Groundwater hydraulics
DE: 1829 Groundwater hydrology
SC: Geodesy [G]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting