Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2007HI177B

Estimating Hydraulic Properties for Volcanic Island Aquifers using Wave Setup

Institute: Hawaii
Year Established: 2007 Start Date: 2007-03-01 End Date: 2008-08-31
Total Federal Funds: $25,424 Total Non-Federal Funds: $46,608

Principal Investigators: Aly El-Kadi, Ali Fares

Project Summary: The objective of this study is to investigate the influence of swells and wave setup on low-frequency water-table variations in a coastal aquifer and to utilize wave setup in hydraulic parameter estimation. The proposed research will contribute to advances in hydrogeological science by addressing an area that is insufficiently investigated. The approach is expected to be beneficial to many high-permeability coastal environments, such as volcanic islands and atolls. The technique will also provide a practical approach for aquifer parameter estimation as an important step towards managing our Hawaii valuable ground-water resources. Different techniques of signal processing will be applied to available data to filter out other environmental impacts, such as barometric and tidal influences, to limit the water-table fluctuations to wave setup. Correlation between wave setup data and observed inland head changes will be investigated. Analytical solutions for tides will be adapted to wave set-up and their accuracy will be tested through comparison against numerical modeling of transient head.