W-SAHaRA
Stochastic Analysis of Well-Head Protection and Risk Assessment
- Start date: 2000
- End date: 2003
- Funded by: European Commission, FP5
- Topic: European level consortium operating in the context of the probabilistic analysis of drinking wells protection.
W-SAHaRA was a European level consortium operating in the context of the probabilistic analysis of drinking wells protection. The consortium was funded by the European Union (Contract No. EVK1-1999-CT-00041), within the Fifth Framework Program (April 2000 – December 2003). It was formed by academic institutions and private/public sector organizations operating in the field of groundwater management and protection. Major problems that European drinking water companies and Environmental Agencies are facing are (a) the development of tools to reliably predict the pattern of the groundwater flow due to drinking well fields operating in heterogeneous formations and (b) the definition of a reliable strategy for the quantification of the risk associated to such predictions. Regulators now understand that once a portion of an aquifer has been severely contaminated its strategic importance is compromised and protection of such resources by the reliable prediction of flow field around pumping stations has a strategic impact at a European level. Traditional deterministic models inherently offer predictions of undetermined quality. The W-SAHaRA Consortium is motivated by the need to recognise the importance of spatial heterogeneities and related uncertainty and incorporate these elements into a comprehensive action aimed to the development of general and robust criteria for an efficient and cost-effective planning and management of groundwater drinking well fields. Many of the techniques being developed within the scope of this project are (in principle) amenable to application to a wide range of problems involving the impact of groundwater pollutants on the environment.
Coordinator
- Politecnico di Milano
Participants
- Municipality of Bologna – Environmental Unit
- HERA SpA of Bologna
- Azienda Generale Servizi Municipali of Verona SpA
- Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
- University of Tuebingen
- Université Louis Pasteur de Strasbourg
- Delft University of Technology
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