Application of airborne electromagnetics to effective
hydrogeological modelling of delicate coastal areas
A. Viezzoli
Aarhus Geophysics APS, Aarhus, Denmark
L. Tosi
Institute of Marine Sciences, CNR, Venezia,
Italy
P. Teatini
Dept. of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Padova, Padova,
Italy
ABSTRACT
Understanding the hydrogeological processes is critical for a sound management of water resources in coastal
areas. Here lie the majority of human settlements and industrial production. Moreover, human pressure on the
environment is constantly increasing, and many studies predict a rising of seawater level in the next 50 years,
raging from a few cm up to some tens of cm, depending on location. These are common characteristics of most
coastal areas, wetlands, lagoons, and estuaries which also have unique flora and fauna depending on the
groundwater-surface water processes. The application of airborne electromagnetics (AEM) for groundwater
monitoring and modeling has been steadily rising in the past decade, due to parallel developments of better AEM
systems together with processing and inversion methologies. It can greatly improve the data quality and
coverage in tidal and coastal areas, together with lagoons, esturaries, and river deltas while
cutting significantly the acquisition costs and providing vital informations on issues like
saline water intrusion etc. In this paper we
present results and applications of AEM to hydrogeological modelling of the Venice lagoon, where the
methodology greatly improved the understanding of the general hydrogeology, both within, below and in the
proximity of the lagoon.
