Groundwater temperature estimation and modeling using hydrogeophysics

Groundwater temperature may be of use as a state variable proxy for aquifer heat storage, highlighting preferential flow paths, or contaminant remediation monitoring. However, its estimation often relies on scarce temperature data collected in boreholes. Hydrogeophysical methods such as electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and distributed temperature sensing (DTS) may provide more exhaustive spatial information of the bulk properties of interest than samples from boreholes. If a properly calibrated DTS reading provides direct measurements of the groundwater temperature in the well, ERT requires one to determine the fractional change per degree Celsius. One advantage of this petrophysical relationship is its relative simplicity: the fractional change is often found to be around 0.02 per degree Celcius, and represents mainly the variation of electrical resistivity due to the viscosity effect. However, in presence of chemical and kinetics effects, the variation may also depend on the duration of the test and may neglect reactions occurring between the pore water and the solid matrix. Such effects are not expected to be important for low temperature systems (<30 °C), at least for short experiments. In this contribution, we use different field experiments under natural and forced flow conditions to review developments for the joint use of DTS and ERT to map and monitor the temperature distribution within aquifers, to characterize aquifers in terms of heterogeneity and to better understand processes. We show how temperature time-series measurements might be used to constraint the ERT inverse problem in space and time and how combined ERT-derived and DTS estimation of temperature may be used together with hydrogeological modeling to provide predictions of the groundwater temperature field.