Climate change is causing a shift in weather patterns leading to more frequent occurrences of intense weather events, like extreme rainfall or prolonged droughts. These changes have severe impacts on various subsurface conditions that in turn impact many communities worldwide, ranging from slope instabilities, to permafrost thaw in the arctic, to groundwater shortages. In this talk, I will highlight how geophysical monitoring, and in particular geoelectrical monitoring, can be used to address these issues. I will show recent developments that enable continuous, long-term geophysical monitoring of the subsurface conditions critical to slope failure, and how such data can be integrated into reliable landslide early warning systems. Based on an example from the Seward Peninsula, Alaska, I will highlight the impact of surface-subsurface interactions, and how increasing temperatures affect subsurface flow in heterogeneous Arctic environments. While the first two examples are in remote settings, I will conclude with an example from an urban setting, where geoelectrical monitoring was used to image subsurface flow pathways of sustainable urban drainage systems, designed to provide stormwater control, but also to ease groundwater shortages in drought prone areas, such as Southern California. With this range of examples, I hope to highlight the diverse range of applications that near-surface geophysical monitoring can provide, and will conclude with an outlook on how such data can be integrated into various observational and modelling approaches to further enhance our predictive understanding of the impact of climate change on natural hazards and groundwater resources.

Geoscientific Colloquium "Perspectives of non-seismic applied near-surface geophysics"

Online via Zoom:
https://uni-bremen.zoom.us/j/96524048625?pwd=VXAyWEVqNHo2Mzd3N1IrSVVrSVNIZz09

Further information:

Dr. Sebastian Uhlemann
e-Mail: SUhlemann@lbl.gov
https://eesa.lbl.gov/profiles/sebastian-uhlemann/