Concepts and Tools for Outdoor Classrooms to Characterize Soil Water in the Vadose Zone: Applications of Hydrology and Hydrological Geophysics

The Environmental Geophysics/Hydrology Program at Brown University employs the didactic of outdoor classrooms not only from the point of view of a structured field laboratory, but also as an opportunity to reach out to the local community, enabling involvement with the local public sector including individual property owners, citizen groups, water managers, and hands-on, one-on-one experience for students with private sector consulting-type investigations. All of this has a particular thematic approach for protecting and managing water resources through understanding the subsurface. The scope of our investigations covers a range of topics, from characterizing hydrogeologic stratigraphy and infrastructure, to better understanding the time-dependent mass balance of soil water in the vadose zone.

We have the good fortune of having a public groundwater supply facility - the Seekonk Well Field - within twenty minutes of the Brown campus. While, purportedly the production wells producing upwards of three million gallons per day of water for the local residents were sited on the basis of noninvasive geophysics, the data, truth be told, were quite sparse, and little is known about the hydraulic properties of the larger recharge area, particularly depth to bedrock and lateral modulations in the basin's transmissivity. Students can readily appreciate the importance of adding their own data, geophysical as well as conventional hydrological data, to this informational database. They quickly realize the benefits of fusing outdoor classrooms with significant research questions beyond the walls of ivy towers, and understand the need to closely integrate their outdoor experience with indoor experiences as they develop the requisite tools of mathematical analysis and modeling. To round out this experience, we encourage strong partnerships with community stakeholders, among whom we include property owners and consumers on one hand, and providers, consultants and water managers on the other.