DL 45 : Application and validation of the general methodology and concept of groundwater vulnerability assessment at regional scale on the Israeli coastal aquifer

This deliverable consists in applying the concepts and methodologies developed in Deliverable
D43 and D44 to synthetic and real case studies. Our researches
have focused on the generalized groundwater vulnerability assessment methodology, and
more precisely on evaluating, under the framework of physically-based indicators, the
groundwater sensitivity/vulnerability to stress factor considering artificial recharge as a potential
response to the degradation of the groundwater resource. In the context, different approaches have been identified in the literature and implemented in appropriate modelling tools (i.e.
HydroGeoSphere) for calculating the various sensitivity/vulnerability coefficients. These
approaches are the influence coefficient method, the sensitivity equation method and the adjoint
operator method. The two first methods show relevant results on both the considered synthetic
case studies that relate groundwater vulnerability to (1) quantity issues and (2) to sea water intrusion. They
illustrate the way of applying the methodology to “real case studies”.These first applications
should be the object of more complex but strongly related case studies.