Mission & Goals#

Here are some details about the mission and the goals of the software.

Mission#

WATex stands for WAT-er-ex-ploration and its mission is :

  • to provide “smart” algorithms for sustainable solutions faced with different challenges in the groundwater exploration field (GWE):

    • For instance, geophysical methods such as DC, EM, and Logging are mostly used in association with pure hydrogeological methods to propose the right location for drilling operations and determine the permeability coefficient parameter k. Unfortunately, despite this combination, unsuccessful, unsustainable boreholes are persisting and the k parameter detection remains costly and difficult to collect thereby creating a huge loss for funders, geophysical and drilling ventures.

      watex henceforth works around these issues by bringing efficient algorithms and smart approaches such as the recovery EM tensors, the automatic location detection for drilling operations, the prediction of flow rate, and the mixture learning strategy using machine learning …

  • to facilitate the reproducibility of some published papers results related to GWE which codes are not available in the literature, to help the academicians of geosciences community, and non-dedicated users who have no-more in-depth skills in programming.

    • Indeed, one of the major problems encountered in the scientific research world is the code availability for reproducing works. Some journals tried their best by recommending that authors must share their codes to make their work reproducible by third-party. Unfortunately, some of the resource codes, once the paper is published are no more available. Sometimes the link referring to codes source does no more exist or is broken. This habit seems not worthy thereby making it difficult for the user and academicians to achieve the same results, especially for new-comers in programming. watex tries to remedy this issue, especially related to GWE by reproducing the results from the paper himself and making the code available for all.

      It invites geosciences developers to adhere to the project by sharing their codes or reproducing published papers related to groundwater exploration in this platform to make together the world better and scientific progress.

      See the development guide for sharing your code or reproduced published papers and making it available for the geosciences community following the software API.

Goals#

Being open-source, the watex expects to help academicians and companies working in the GWE field to achieve the following goals:

  • reducing the unsuccessful and unsustainable boreholes during the drinking water supply campaign (DWSC) by predicting the flow rate (FR ) before any drilling operations and be more accurate in minimizing losses for future hydro-geophysical engineering projects.

  • minimizing the failure of pumping tests by predicting in advance the permeability coefficient k. Furthermore, it should be an alternative way for geosciences engineers to accurately define the depth of the existing underground aquifer, to find the depth to start and end the pumping test.

  • improving the traditional geophysical methods by detecting the appropriate location for drilling operations;

  • proposing a fast and efficient solution in the processing of short-period electromagnetic data especially the Natural Source Audio-frequency Magnetotellurics (NSAMT) to locate the conductive zone for the drilling operations after the EM survey.

  • contributing in the SDG-n6 and the Africa-Union Agenda-2063-n1 achievements for the rural and urban population welfare.

  • globally providing a better future by putting a little smile on children’s faces of families from the poorest regions of the world and Africa in particular.

  • reproducing the published papers related to GWE field to help academicians and non-dedicated user for achieving the results of published papers which codes are not available in the litterature.

Benefits#

watex has been used to solve a real-engineering problem, such as the FR prediction during DWSC. It aims to compute some geoelectrical parameters using the DC-resistivity methods (Resistivity Profiling and vertical sounding) and used the Support vector machines for the FR prediction with a success rate greater than 77%. The case history is published in Water Resources Research journal.

Note

Although many novel approaches are focused on hydro-geophysical issues resolution, it is not limited to that way, It also implements geology methods through the geology sub-packages. Any other fields in geosciences where new approaches are discovered and useful to address a problem in the GWE field are welcome.