Course Description:

This one-day course will provide environmental professionals, consulting hydrogeologists, and engineers with the background necessary for evaluating and participating in the selection of appropriate geophysical technologies for projects involving soil and ground water contamination. The material will provide the technical foundation needed to understand the use and limitations of common near-surface geophysical methods used in soil and ground water contamination studies. Specific consideration will be given to magnetometry, (EM) terrain conductivity, ground penetrating radar (GPR) and direct current (DC) resistivity techniques. A demonstration of one commonly used method, electrical resistivity imaging, will be provided along with a description of preliminary data reduction techniques. The course is intended for technical professionals, public agency and regulatory agency staff, university staff, responsible parties, case managers, and anyone else interested in the latest geophysical tools and technologies for application to hydrogeologic problems.

Instructor:

Dr. Lee Slater is a Professor of Near Surface Geophysics at Rutgers-Newark, New Jersey, USA. He has coauthored over ninety peer-reviewed publications on near surface and environmental geophysics, and served as principal investigator on multiple awards from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Geological Survey totally ~$7 m of external research funding. Professor Slater served as Chair of the Near Surface Geophysics Focus Group of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) from July 2008- June 2010, Associate Editor of the AGU journal Water Resources Research from October 2004-December 2010 and Associate Editor of the Journal of Environmental and Engineering Geophysics (JEEG) from 1999-2004. He recently served as guest Associate Editor of the special issue on “Hydrogeophysics – Methods and Processes”, European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE) journal of Near Surface Geophysics.

Assistant: 

Dr. Markus Wehrer is a postdoctoral scientist and research associate focusing on hydrogeophysics at Rutgers-Newark, New Jersey, USA. He is the primary author of six peer reviewed publications on soils and groundwater contamination. Markus received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Geo-Sciences / Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 2006 and served as a postdoctoral scientist at the same institution until coming to Rutgers- Newark in 2011. Dr Wehrer is the recipient of a prestigious fellowship from the German Research Foundation.