kalfeat(stands for Kouadio et al. features detection) is designed for predicting the groundwater flow rate (FR) from the geology and DC resistivity data. In developing countries, during the campaigns for drinking water supply (CDWS), the DC-resistivity method is mostly used especially
the electrical resistivity profiling (ERP) for detecting the conductive zone and the vertical electrical sounding (VES) to speculate about the existence of the fracture zone before proposing a drilling point. However, despite the use of both methods, the accurate drilling point after ERP and VES was not always the best and faced some difficulties. To workaround this problem, some geological companies try to propose a least three points the maximize their chance to get least the required FR (RFR) by the project depending on the number of living population in the survey area. This trick has three shortcomings:
- first, one unsuccessful borehole costs at around 25 245 $US and 8 415$US per survey, which is an expensive loss especially when the CDWS covers at least 2000 villages.
- second, if all three proposed points fail to give the RFR, the local companies must take the whole fees in charge to make a new survey. This occasionally creates a loss of investments from partners and governments.
- the last issue is the numerous of unsustainable boreholes obtained after a few year of use by the population. Indeed, the borehole becomes unsustainable when it dried up after a few years of use. This is a critial issue frequently occurs when the FR is sufficiently not enough to satisfy the living population demand. Although, the climate change is one of the cause of that issue, the other factor is caused by the use of the traditional criteria (criteria mostly used by geophysicists to speculate about the goodness of the proposed drilling point) for determining the expected drilling points using ERP and VES.
Faced with the problems enumerated above, kalfeat is designed to bring a piece solution in the detection of the geo-electrical features which are known as
the foremost criteria to select the right location before any drilling locations. The aim of kalfeat is twofold:
- minimize the rate of unsuccessful drillings after the geological survey during CDWS and save money from geophysical and drilling companies.
- maximize the number of boreholes intended for the populations and also encourage the partners to indirectly solve the problem of water scarcity.
kalfeat is under GNU-GPL License v3.
One can read the paper below to better understand the kalfeat features definitions.
Kouadio, K. L., Kouame, L. N., Drissa, C., Mi, B., Kouamelan, K. S., Gnoleba, S. P. D., et al. (2022). Groundwater Flow Rate Prediction from Geo‐Electrical Features using Support Vector Machines. Water Resources Research, (May 2022). https://doi.org/10.1029/2021wr031623
- Key Laboratory of Resources and Hazard detection, School of Geosciences and Info-physics, Central South University, China.
- Laboratoire de Géologie Ressources Minérales et Energétiques, UFR des Sciences de la Terre et des Ressources Minières, Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Cote d'Ivoire.
- Developer: 1, 2- LKouadio, <etanoyau@gmail.com>