Be. Vieux et al., WELLHEAD PROTECTION AREA DELINEATION USING A COUPLED GIS AND GROUNDWATER MODEL, Journal of environmental management, 54(3), 1998, pp. 205-214
The 1986 Amendments to the United States Safe Drinking Wafer Act (SDWA
) made wellhead protection an important issue for wafer suppliers in t
he US. These Amendments mandate that each Stale develop a wellhead pro
tection program (WHPP) to protect the wellhead areas of all public wat
er systems from contaminants that may have adverse human health effect
s. Data requirements to support a WHPP can become unwieldy without the
benefit of a system that can handle large databases involving spatial
relationships. Geographic information systems (GIS) store, analyse, m
ap and illustrate data sets of complex spatial information, and can th
erefore be used to integrate and analyse various types of spatial data
needed to delineate wellhead protection areas. The Cheyenne-Arapaho t
ribe has initiated a study of the groundwater resources on the Concho
Reserve in Canadian County, Oklahoma, US. Groundwater within the Conch
o Researve is vulnerable to contamination because of the high permeabi
lity of the alluvial aquifer associated with the North Canadian River
Pollutants of concern are associated with industrial agricultural and
domestic sources in the recharge area. This paper describes the develo
pment of an interface allowing the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribe to delineate
and manage wellhead protection areas (WHPAs). The system described he
rein provides for two modes of operation. The first, in which a well s
ite is selected and possible sources of contamination are identified,
is termed the forward problem. The second, where the ensemble area of
possible well sites for which no known sources of contamination exist,
is termed the backward problem. The system developed provides efficie
nt management and protection of tribal drinking-wafer resources. (C) 1
998 Academic Press.