Hydrogeophysics: An overview of general concepts, applications and future perspectives

Abstract

Hydrogeophysics is an emerging discipline that holds great promise in characterizing hydrogeological parameters and processes. A tight collaboration between hydrogeologists and
geophysicists is necessary to achieve the most appropriate use of geophysics in hydrogeology, mainly for planning the geophysical activities in accordance to the hydrogeological target to be investigated and for the interpretation or translation of the geophysical documents into hydrogeological documents. For this collaboration to be meaningful, it is of great importance to share a common language allowing communication feasible: geophysicists have to know the fundamentals of the hydrogeological process, and hydrogeologists have to know the fundamentals of geophysical methods. This is basically the main objective of this paper, where fundamental concepts of both disciplines, their contributions, the methods available, data integration approaches, and future perspectives as well as the hydrogeophysical challenges are presented.

Key words: hydrogeophysics, geophysics, hydrogeology, surface geophysics and hydrogeophysical methods