Palæochannels in Northern New South Wales: Inversion of electromagnetic induction data to infer hydrologically relevant stratigraphy
R. W. Vervoort A B and Y. L. Annen AA Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia, and Australian Cotton Cooperative Research Centre, Narrabri, NSW 2390, Australia.
B Corresponding author. Email: w.vervoort@acss.usyd.edu.au
Australian Journal of Soil Research 44(1) 35-45 https://doi.org/10.1071/SR05037
Submitted: 21 March 2005 Accepted: 11 October 2005 Published: 10 February 2006
Abstract
Palæochannels, or prior streams, are strings of sandier sediments that occur frequently in the irrigated alluvial plains of Northern New South Wales, Australia. These landscape features have been recognised as locations of substantial deep drainage losses, and are therefore target areas for water use efficiency. Electromagnetic induction (EM) measurements were used to identify the width and the depth of the palæochannel sediments in a 2-dimensional transect. Three different inversion techniques, Tikhonov regularisation, the McNeill layered earth model, and an optimal linear combination of EM measurements, were applied to a combination of EM-38 and EM-34 data. Using various kriging techniques, the resulting conductivity profiles were interpolated to soil property data and transformed to saturated hydraulic conductivities using pedotransfer functions. There were distinct differences in the resulting stratigraphies depending on the inversion and interpolation method employed. Trend kriging of the sampled soil property data using the Cook and Walker and Tikhonov inversion data as a trend surface gave the most consistent hydraulic conductivity values compared to the sampled soil property data. However, differences between inversion and interpolation methods were negated by uncertainties in the pedotransfer functions.
Additional keywords: geophysics, vadose zone hydrology, kriging.
Acknowledgments
This research was partly funded by the Australian Cotton CRC through an honours research scholarship for YLA. The authors would like to thank Auscott Ltd for access to the field site and ongoing research support, Dr B Borchers for making his MATLAB code available on the worldwide web, and Dr B Minasny for assisting in converting some of the MATLAB code to R.
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