How Reliable are your Groundwater Level Measurements?

Over the past few years, Eijkelkamp Soil & Water (the Netherlands) has gained knowledge on managing groundwater networks. This knowledge also serves as a foundation for our ongoing efforts to develop and enhance the collected data. For example, in the course of our activities, we have observed a growing discrepancy between manually-collected measurements and measurements collected with a pressure sensor. This led us to set up a research programme aimed at improving the generically-applicable correction procedure for automated groundwater level measurements. In this programme, we studied the measurement series generated by the pressure sensors, to determine whether there is a systematic trend in the deviations between the manual measurements and the measurements collected by a pressure sensor like the Diver water level logger.

Existing correction procedures often prescribe linear or incremental corrections. But is this approach actually correct, and how reliable are manual measurements? Previous research indicates that manual measurements have a possible error of 2 centimeter, but in incidental cases this margin of error can rise to 1 meter.

This research ultimately led Eijkelkamp Soil & Water, working in partnership with Alterra Wageningen UR, to develop a tool that allows the user to correct time series generated by automatic pressure sensors on the basis of multiple manual measurements.

Would you like to know more about the study or the tool developed in this context? In that case, feel free to download the (Dutch) study ‘Systematic errors in measurements of groundwater levels with pressure sensors’ at eijkelkamp.com or to contact Leon van Hamersveld, Trainer/Consultant at the Eijkelkamp Academy.