MOST SIGNIFICANT RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS

1. Work in the area of groundwater and heat transport. My earlier research with Dr. Leslie Smith (1985) on groundwater and thermal regimes, was a world “first” in identifying the three-dimensional topographic effects on subsurface heat and groundwater, and is widely respected and quoted. Our follow-up work in 1988 on thermal and hydrologic inversion is considered a benchmark in studies of heat and groundwater flow and has been referred to as “pioneering work”. My work is particularly important in the hydrologic sciences in that it showed how heat flow determinations are greatly affected by groundwater flow, and how this dependency could be exploited for site characterization. The impact of this work is continuing to be felt in hydrogeology as more attention on thermal and groundwater interactions is now being given. I was invited to write a chapter in an AGU monograph series on data integration. This chapter focused on combining thermal and hydrologic methods in groundwater (see Woodbury, 2007) .

2. Geoexchange and Northern Climate. During the last six year period, Grant Ferguson and I have investigated the anomalous thermal regime beneath Winnipeg, Canada. This “heat island” effect makes it difficult to resolve information on past climates and in some areas the temperature increases may also have an impact of geothermal energy resources. This work has been well received not only internationally but by Manitoba Hydro, the local engineering community, and by the American Geophysical Union, who selected the work as one of their featured articles. A recent, comprehensive study, has shown that most open-loop geothermal developments in the Winnipeg area will inevitably experience temperature increases due to heat transport occurring between the injection and withdrawal wells in an individual system. This work is of particular interest to the recently approved Waverley West subdivision and any similar developments that may occur in the future. Work in temperature surveys and methods to determine past climatic changes from boreholes is also continuing and is the subject of a newly published works with Ferguson and also Jim Hendry, at the University of Saskatchewan.

3. Improvements in atmosphere/land surface interactions. One of my long-term goals is to develop an efficient hydrological and numerical coupling of the land surface with groundwater flow, and also with the atmosphere through accurate descriptions of the lower boundary conditions. We succeeded in benchmarking our improved version of the Canadian Land Surface Scheme SABAE-HW, and inter-comparisons to other models such as HYDRUS-1D and HELP3 ensure the applicability and viability of our code. Lei Wen, Charles Lin and I are moving ahead with numerical programming towards the ultimate coupling of our groundwater code with the Canadian GCM, in order to allow for more accurate exchanges of water and energy fluxes between the atmosphere and the earth surface. The overall objective is to assist the Drought Research Initiate (DRI) and other research efforts in trying to understand, assess and quantify the evolution of drought. Also, the future inclusion of human practices in each of the model components (agriculture, pumping, wastes, and so on) will allow us to study the influences on climate variability and change. As a result of interactions and synergies created within the above network, other publications have been targeted to understand the evolution of climate in the north of Canada^.

Information-based inversion. I am probably best known for my work with Tad Ulrych (UBC) in probabilistic methods (Bayesian, Maximum Entropy, Minimum Relative Entropy, MRE). My 1993 work represented the first time that the maximum entropy approach was applied in Groundwater Hydrology. Note that there is a large degree of uncertainty in the measured values of fundamental flow and transport parameters and the development of methods assigning probability distributions to these parameters is extremely useful, and crucial. Leading researchers in the field routinely refer to my work. Since mathematical inversion is the cornerstone-problem in geophysics, the impact of these works has been high. For example, with my research team, I have successfully used these information-based techniques to effectively image the Edwards Aquifer in Texas⁶. The developed transmissivity field was adopted by the USGS in their most recent model of the aquifer. This is a strategically important aquifer in South Central Texas that is the sole source of water supply for San Antonio. My contributions to the development of MRE and Bayes have been prominently featured in textbooks by Rubin (2003), Ulrych and Sacchi (2005), and in my own monograph mentioned above (Woodbury, 2007). An earlier paper with Tad Ulrych in 2001 on Bayes has been widely referred to and cited in the geophysical literature.

5. Stochastics and Geostatistics. My work in groundwater contamination processes with Dr. Edward Sudicky has also lead to significant findings. Our 1991 paper is considered a benchmark by leading theoreticians and experimentalists, and has become highly cited (over 151 times to date). This work, along with the subsequent analysis of the Borden experimental tracer cloud, effectively ended the controversy on the Borden findings that existed at that time. The Borden, Ontario experimental site was and continues to be, routinely quoted for its importance in the entire area of groundwater contamination. The unique aspect of my work in this area is that it combines field observations of contaminant plumes with geostatistics, Bayesian viewpoints of probability, stochastic theories of transport and high-resolution numerical simulations. Work in this area continued with applications to large aquifer systems.