Derivation of site-specific relationships between hydraulic parameters and p-wave velocities based on hydraulic and seismic tomography

In this study, hydraulic and seismic tomographic measurements were used to derive a site-specific relationship between the geophysical parameter p-wave velocity and the hydraulic parameters, diffusivity and specific storage. Our field study includes diffusivity tomograms derived from hydraulic travel time tomography, specific storage tomograms, derived from hydraulic attenuation tomography, and p-wave velocity tomograms, derived from seismic tomography. The tomographic inversion was performed in all three cases with the Simultaneous Iterative Reconstruction Technique algorithm, using a ray tracing technique with curved trajectories. The experimental set up was designed such that the p-wave velocity tomogram overlaps the hydraulic tomograms by half. The experiments were performed at a well-characterized sand and gravel aquifer, located in the Leine River valley near Gottingen, Germany. Access to the shallow subsurface was provided by direct-push technology. The high spatial resolution of hydraulic and seismic tomography was exploited to derive representative site-specific relationships between the hydraulic and geophysical parameters, based on the area where geophysical and hydraulic tests were performed. The transformation of the p-wave velocities into hydraulic properties was undertaken using a k-means cluster analysis. Results demonstrate that the combination of hydraulic and geophysical tomographic data is a promising approach to improve hydrogeophysical site characterization.