Pilot area activities – #11 Groundwater monitoring in Bratislava, Slovakia

Radovan Cernak, 30 March 2020

Installation of new monitoring network to assess shallow geothermal energy resources in a highly urbanized area

Bratislava is nowadays a rapidly developing city with growing demands on energy for heating as well as cooling of buildings. The State Geological Institute of Dionýz Štúr (SGIDS) is continuously monitoring of thermal, hydraulic and chemical regime of shallow aquifers underlying the city to evaluate possible conflicts between drinking water supply and shallow geothermal energy use.

The monitoring network encompasses the broader vicinity of the MUSE pilot area. It consists of several hydrogeologic boreholes up to 20 m deep, with installed dataloggers.

The team of SGIDS employed autonomous submerged probes Solinst LTC Levelogger, measuring water level, temperature and electric conductivity in 1 hour intervals. Measured data are stored in internal memory of each probe. Every three months SGIDS visits all boreholes and downloads measured values from the probes. Besides this, we perform a general borehole and probes maintenance, including cleaning, removing of biofilm and roots and replacing corroded parts. The data is then stored in a central database. Prior to this the water level data is barometrically corrected using continuous measurements of barometric pressure.

For more information, please contact:
Radovan Černák, radovan.cernak@geology.sk

MUSE pilot area (pink line) with monitored boreholes (red dots).
Example of a monitored borehole and a datalogger read-out (inset).
Visualisation of measured timeseries for groundwater temperatures (red line) and groundwater level (blue line).

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