Journal of Environmental & Engineering Geophysics (JEEG)

Park Seismic's ParkSEIS Mount Sopris Instruments Geometrics' Geode EM3D Advanced Geosciences, Inc. Geostuff's AnySeis SAGA Geophysics, Inc.

A Forward by the Editor

I truly enjoy the professional engagement from attending society meetings and the March 2019 SAGEEP was no different. This year it was set in Portland, OR and it was a great opportunity to re-engage with old friends and meet new ones. The talks I attended were really interesting and I like where our industry is heading in terms of technology, solutions, outreach, and education. From all of these viewpoints, geophysics has a very healthy forward growth trajectory. It’s amazing to watch and a lot of fun to be in it with all of you.

One of my initiatives with the journal and society is to showcase the best that we have to offer. With this in mind, I created the Alan Witten best paper award and this year was the second opportunity to present what I thought exemplifies the quality and technical insight that we should all strive to achieve. It is not an easy task narrowing down to a single paper as there are usually several from which I have to choose. For example, Dr. Parsekian’s paper on water content estimation with multi-offset GPR (Parsekian, 2018), Dr. Jacob’s paper on GPR mapping of icy debris fans (Jacob et al., 2018), and Dr. Diamanti’s GPR paper on a new wide angle reflection and refraction (WARR) machine for GPR (Diamanti et al., 2018) all were excellent. After much deliberation, I chose Dr. Ikard’s paper titled ‘New Insights on Scale-dependent Surface-Groundwater Ex- change from a Floating Self-potential Dipole’ (Ikard, 2018). The paper was highly detailed and insightful for understanding a common issue in hydrology – surface water-groundwater exchange. I look forward to presenting next year’s winner.

Beyond Dr. Ikard’s paper, there have been several other great hydrogeological papers between the covers of JEEG. If interested, you should check out the studies that present groundwater either as an asset or a detriment. In several works from China, where infrastructure projects for tunnels or coal mining are common, finding water before excavating is extremely important (e.g., Chang et al., 2017; Xue et al., 2018a,b; Khan et al., 2018; Zhou et al., 2018) and electromagnetic methods have been primarily used for these investigations. In other works, knowing where the groundwater is from a scientific investigation standpoint (e.g., Wynn et al., 2016; Eadie et al., 2017; Paine and Collins, 2017; Revel et al., 2017; Ruiz-Aguilar et al., 2018; Layek et al., 2018) has revealed the power of multiple methods for these styles of projects. Another group includes using geophysical data for hydraulic parameter estimation (e.g., Shen et al., 2016; Al-Shuhail and Adetunji, 2016; Garner and Coffman, 2016; Ikard and Kress, 2016; Allred et al., 2016). All of these works offer a treasure trove of information that you will find useful presented in a very practical format. I encourage you to check them out.

Dale Rucker, Editor