We are spotlighting two technical presentations from last year’s 2025 Western Groundwater Congress — a key event which brought together groundwater professionals, researchers, and practitioners to advance understanding and innovation across the water management community.
Presented by Aestus’ Staff Geologist/Field Technician, Madison Culver, this talk explored a scalable approach to regional aquifer monitoring that builds on traditional well data by integrating Temporal Electrical Resistivity Imaging (TERI).
Conventional regional monitoring relies on widely spaced wells that can miss dynamic subsurface changes. TERI collects continuous 2D resistivity data at kilometer scales, enabling repeated monitoring of the vadose and phreatic zones to depths of hundreds of feet with minimal installation impact. This presentation highlighted TERI installation methods and time-lapse datasets, showing how electrical hydrogeology can detect shifts in groundwater volume, bioactivity, and chemistry that simple interpolation between wells often overlooks.
This session showcased a “scan first then drill” workflow, for which Aestus was recently awarded the NGWA Outstanding Groundwater Supply Project Award for 2026.
An arid Oklahoma region where sparse data created uncertainty around well placement, Aestus deployed electrical resistivity imaging across ~1 square mile and integrated these results with regional hydrogeology, topography, and lithologic data into a 3D interpretive model. Seven test well targets were selected from resistivity-based anomalies indicative of favorable porosity and permeability. All wells yielded high quality and quantity — demonstrating that targeted scanning can save time, reduce drilling costs, and increase confidence in wellfield design.
