Implementation of Simple Strategies to Improve Wellfield Management in Arid Regions: The Case Study of Wadi Al Arab Wellfield, Jordan

Abstract

Groundwater is the main source of drinking water supply in Jordan. Over the past 30 years, many wellfields have been drilled and expanded to cover increasing drinking water demand caused by natural population growth, development of life standards and as a result of the influx of refugees to Jordan. In particular, northern Jordan groundwater resources have been severely depleted. Therefore, water suppliers and utilities have been increasingly challenged to meet water demand and deliver water of adequate quality and quantity to households in a timely manner. Meeting these objectives requires good data management, proper maintenance of groundwater wells, and effective wellfield management plans. We developed a novel monitoring strategy that allows the collection of relevant data for wellfield managers (e.g., yield, static and dynamic water level, as well as energy consumption). The new monitoring system, implemented in 2017, has greatly enhanced data availability in comparison to the situation between 2012 and 2016. The data are used in an operational decision support tool based on simple interpretation of the field observations. The implementation of the project was done using both bottom-up and top-down approaches for the Wadi Al Arab wellfield. Our results evidence that (i) simple strategies can lead to a significant improvement of wellfield management, reducing the maintenance time of the wells though appropriate monitoring (from an average of four days/maintenance/well in 2012 to less than one day/maintenance/well in 2017); (ii) the joint combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches leads to an effective implementation of the monitoring system; (iii) the simplicity of the proposed monitoring strategy makes it suitable for further implementation in other wellfields in Jordan and countries in a similar situation of both data and water scarcity.

Prediction of land degradation by Machine Learning Methods

“…We had a different response variable in comparison to the research made by Jeihoni et al ( 2015), but our results also showed the usefulness of ANN like the authors stated. Looking at the statistical indices, we found that the ANN has the highest efficiency which agrees with other findings (Khaki et al, 2015;Alizamir et al, 2017;Alqadi et al 2019;Sebghatiand Gholami, 2019;Meshram et al2020). We combined the results of ANN with Ordinary Kriging to predict groundwater condition map.…”

“…Recent approaches in non-classical methods have also raised the bias in the application of spatial statistics for realization of spatial replacements (Jeihouni et al, 2015). The level of groundwater indicates groundwater availability, groundwater flow, and the substantial attribute of an aquifer (Nair and Sindhu, 2016;Alqadi et al, 2019). Several models have been used to evaluate groundwater quantity and quality in the world (Bodrud-Doza et al, 2016).…”

Causes and consequences of long-term groundwater overabstraction in Jordan

“…Wadi Al Arab wellfield (Fig. 3c) provides around 40% of the drinking water supply of Irbid (Alqadi et al 2019), one of the biggest cities in Jordan with almost 1 million inhabitants (DoS 2019). When the wellfield was established in 1982, six out of nine wells of Wadi Al Arab wellfield were artesian; however, only a few years after production started, groundwater levels started to fall and spring flow in the area ceased almost completely (Subah and Hobler 2006).…”

Hydrogeochemical Features and Genesis of Confined Groundwater and Health Perspectives for Sustainable Development in Urban Hengshui, North China Plain

“…e available freshwater is dominantly stored underground and accounts for approximately 96% of the total liquid freshwater on Earth [1]. Groundwater is a significant water source enabling the security of water and food and the key factor lifting the rural populations out of poverty over the world [2][3][4][5], especially in arid and semiarid regions with relative scarcity of surface water [6][7][8][9][10]. e availability of groundwater resources for the human community is limited not only by the water quantity but also by the hydrochemical quality [11,12].…”