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Doctorat
États-Unis
2011
Geoenvironmental and structural studies for developing new water resources in arid and semi-arid regions using remote sensing and GIS
Titre : Geoenvironmental and structural studies for developing new water resources in arid and semi-arid regions using remote sensing and GIS
Auteur : Amer, Reda Mohammed
Université de soutenance : Saint Louis University
Grade : Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) 2011
Résumé
Water crises are rising with increasing world population and decreasing of
freshwater resources. This problem is magnified in the arid and semi-arid regions because
surface water resources are very limited and highly unreliable and therefore groundwater
is the primary source of water supply in these regions. This study presents an integrated
approach for the identification of groundwater occurrences using remote sensing,
geological, and geophysical data, and establishing sustainable paths to groundwater
management. The Central Eastern Desert (CED) of Egypt was selected as a test site for
this study because its climate is arid and there is an urgent need to identify potential areas
for groundwater accumulations. Field investigations indicated that the CED has three
types of aquifers ; shallow alluvial (SA), and fracture zone (FZ) aquifers in the valley
depressions, and deep aquifers in the sedimentary succession that range in age from Late
Cretaceous to Recent in the marginal extensional sub-basins (ESB) along the Red Sea
coast. I developed three models : 1) a Geographic Information System (GIS) model for
groundwater potential in the SA and FZ shallow aquifers ; 2) a kinematic model for the
development of the ESB ; and 3) a groundwater budget model for the ESB aquifers. The
GIS model is based on the analysis of remote sensing data of the Phased Array L-band
Synthetic Aperture Radar, the Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus, and the
Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer digital elevation
model. The model was evaluated and proven successful against the existing shallow
water wells, and by geophysical surveys using Ground Penetrating Radar and Geoelectric methods. The kinematic model indicated that the ESB were formed in the orthogonal
rifting phase in the late Oligocene that is followed by oblique rifting phase during theearly Miocene which resulted to the en-echelon pattern of the inland ESB and nucleation
of the rift depression into segments separated by oblique-slip accommodation zones. The
groundwater budget model shows that the ESB aquifers have considerable amounts of
paleowater that can be purified and used for drinking. The renewable groundwater of SA
and FZ aquifers can be used for herding, irrigation, and ore dressing in the mining zones
Mots clés : Arid regions, Geographic information systems, Groundwater resources, Structural geology, Semiarid regions
Page publiée le 13 mai 2012, mise à jour le 24 septembre 2017