Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2006DE70B

Hydraulic Properties of the Unconfined Aquifer in Southern New Castle County

Institute: Delaware
Year Established: 2006 Start Date: 2006-06-01 End Date: 2007-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $1,750 Total Non-Federal Funds: $3,500

Principal Investigators: Alan Andres

Project Summary: The unconfined aquifer, also known as the Columbia aquifer, is an important water resource in Southern New Castle County. This aquifer is used as a source of water by domestic, irrigation, and public supply wells. The Columbia is the source of all base flow in streams. All ground water in deeper confined aquifers has flowed through the Columbia aquifer. Despite the importance of this aquifer, there have been very few measurements made of saturated hydraulic conductivity (K) of this aquifer. Such K data are needed to allow quantitative analysis of water availability, sustainable pumping rates, and contaminant transport. The goal of this undergraduate internship project is to gain practical knowledge and experience in the acquisition and management of subsurface geologic and aquifer testing data and interpretation and analysis of hydrogeologic data. There are three main components to the research: (a) field data acquisition: participation in measuring ground-water levels with manual and automated equipment, conducting single well aquifer tests, and developing monitoring wells for testing; (b) data compilation: Training in the steps routinely employed for automated and manual compilation of hydrogeologic data, and data QA/QC tasks. This work is done with spreadsheet, GIS, and database software packages and requires constructing charts and tables and completing statistical evaluation of data; (c) analyses of hydrogeologic data: gaining direct experience with analysis of hydrogeologic data. This includes interpreting descriptive logs of boreholes, interpreting grain size distribution data, and analyzing aquifer test data.