ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING OF LEAKS USING TIME LAPSED LONG ELECTRODE ELECTRICAL RESISTIVITY

Highly industrialized areas pose significant challenges for surface based electrical resistivity characterization and monitoring due to the high degree of metallic infrastructure. The infrastructure is typically several orders of magnitude more conductive than the desired targets, preventing the geophysicist from obtaining a clear picture of the subsurface. These challenges may be minimized if steel-cased wells are used as long electrodes. We demonstrate a method of using long electrodes in a complex nuclear waste facility to monitor a simulated leak from an underground storage tank. The leak was simulated by injecting high conductivity fluid in a perforated well and the resistivity measurements were made before and after the leak test. The data were processed in four dimensions, where a regularization procedure was applied in both the time and space domains. The results showed a lowered resistivity feature develop south of the injection site. The time lapsed regularization parameter had a strong influence on the differences in inverted resistivity between the pre and post datasets, potentially making calibration of the results to specific hydrogeologic parameters difficult.