Giuditta Lecca

CRS4 Centro di Ricerca, Sviluppo e Studi Superiori in Sardegna | CRS4 · VALE Program

Seawater intrusion is one of the major threats to freshwater resources in coastal areas, often exacerbated by groundwater overexploitation. Mitigation measures are needed to properly manage aquifers, and to restore groundwater quality. This study integrates three computational tools into a unified framework to investigate seawater intrusion in coas...

The Gaza aquifer is the main source of water for agricultural, domestic, and industrial uses in the Gaza Strip. The rapid increase on water demand due to continuous population growth has led to water scarcity and contamination by seawater intrusion (SWI). Furthermore, current projections of future climatic conditions (IPCC, 2007) point to potential...

Advances in e-Infrastructure promise to revolutionize sensing systems and the way in which data are collected and assimilated, and complex water systems are simulated and visualized. According to the EU Infrastructure 2010 work-programme, data and compute infrastructures and their underlying technologies, either oriented to tackle scientific challe...

The Korba aquifer, located in the north of Tunisia, suffers heavily from salinization due to seawater intrusion. In 2000, the aquifer was exploited from more than 9000 wells. The problem is that no precise information was recorded concerning the current extraction rates, their spatial distribution, or their evolution in time. In this study, a geost...

Due to its intensive data processing and highly distributed organization, the multidisciplinary Earth Science applications community is uniquely positioned for the uptake and exploitation of Grid technologies. Currently Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, and other large Grid infrastructures are already deployed and capable of operational services. So fa...

A decision support system based on a simulation/optimization approach has been developed and applied to the Gaza Strip coastal aquifer (Palestine) to manage sustainable aquifer development under effective recharge operations and water quality constraints. The paper describes model development and simulation results.

Uncertainties in the physical parameters of a groundwater system, due to the lack of direct access to the subsurface, strongly affect the design of water management policies, so that the risk of mismanagement becomes a critical factor in complex ecological and economic analyses. Stochastic modeling may help provide uncertainty quantification and al...

AQUAGRID is the subsurface hydrology computational service of the Sardinian GRIDA3 infrastructure, designed to deliver complex environmental applications via a user-friendly Web portal. The service aims to provide to water professionals integrated modeling tools to solve water resources management problems and aid decision making for contaminated s...

GRIDA3 (Shared Resources Manager for Environmental Data Analysis and Applications) is a multidisciplinary project designed to deliver an integrated system to forge solutions to some environmental challenges such as the constant increase of polluted sites, the sustainability of natural resources usage and the forecast of extreme meteorological event...

The leading challenges of environmental sciences require computing power, sensing devices and storage capacity that hardly a single organization, public or private, might acquire. GRIDA3 (Shared Resources Manager for Environmental Data Analysis and Applications, http://grida3.crs4.it) is a multidisciplinary project designed to deliver an integrated...

Groundwater contamination by seawater intrusion is a problem of growing concern to water resources managers worldwide. We present here a stochastic modeling technique, based on a 3D coupled flow and transport groundwater model, to assess the risk of salinization in a multi-layered coastal aquifer, under model parameter uncertainty. The 127 km2 aqui...

Seawater intrusion is an important environmental problem in the coastal aquifers of many Mediterranean countries. In the 438 km 2 Korba aquifer of eastern Tunisia, a large increase in the number of pumping wells for irrigation purposes since the 1960s has resulted in significant lowering of water table levels in several observation piezometers, and...

In many coastal areas intensive irrigation and groundwater withdrawal can exert counterbalancing effects on the dynamics of seawater intrusion in the aquifer, particularly when non-aquifer irrigation water (artificial recharge) is also used. When, as is often encountered, a shallow phreatic aquifer is separated from a deeper aquifer by a possibly d...

A numerical model that treats density-dependent variably saturated flow and miscible salt transport is used to investigate the occurrence of seawater intrusion in the Korba coastal plain of northeastern Tunisia. We examine the effects of and interplay between pumping, artificial recharge, soil/aquifer properties, and the unsaturated zone. The data...

A numerical study is being undertaken to investigate the occurrence and to assess the importance of saltwater intrusion in the Sahel region along the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The zone, which extends from the cities of Safi and el Jadida for about 100 km in length, is an important agricultural plain where groundwater is heavily used as an irrigati...

The solution of the poroelastic equations for predicting land subsidence above productive gas/oil fields may be addressed by the principle of virtual works using either the effective intergranular stress, with the pore pressure gradient regarded as a distributed body force, or the total stress incorporating the pore pressure. In the finite element...

A numerical model that treats density-dependent variably saturated flow and miscible salt transport is used to investigate the occurrence of seawater intrusion in the Korba aquifer of the eastern coast of Cap-Bon in northern Tunisia. We examine the interplay between pumping regimes and recharge scenarios and its effect on the saline water distribut...

A geographic information system and a three-dimensional coupled variable density and saturation numerical model are implemented for the Korba coastal aquifer of northeastern Tunisia, and preliminary simulations are performed to investigate seawater intrusion phenomena. The GIS provides an essential platform for data management, enabling the organiz...

. The data-parallel programming paradigm emerges as the natural choice for a large class of scientific applications. One of its most significant features consists in hiding the details of the communications and synchronizations among processors, leaving them to the compiler. The advent of the new standard data-parallel language, High Performance Fo...

The data-parallel programming paradigm emerges as the natural choice for a large class of scientific applications. One of its most significant features consists in hiding the details of the communications and synchronizations among processors, leaving them to the compiler. The advent of the new standard data-parallel language, High Performance Fort...

In this paper, we present a grid-enabled subsurface hydrology application to quantify the impact of the groundwater exploitation uncertainty on the seawater intrusion of the Korba coastal aquifer (Tunisia). A suite of methods and tools are developed and applied for decision support of sustainable costal development with special emphasis on groundwa...

The paper describes the benefits of Grid technology to facilitate the access to distributed data, their processing and visualization in geosciences, by means of the AQUAGRID application. AQUAGRID is the subsurface hydrology service of the Sardinian GRIDA3 infrastructure, designed to deploy complex environmental applications via a user-friendly Web...

The Muravera plain is located in the South-Eastern part of Sardinia, Italy's second largest island, at the mouth of the Flumendosa river, and covers an extension of about 130 km2. The three main centers of the plain (Muravera, Villaputzu and San Vito) comprise a population of circa 13000. The main economic activities in this area are farming, citru...

The study site covers an area of 273 km 2 in the Oristano plain on the western coast of central Sardinia (Italy). In the coastal area, since 1950, intensive agriculture and subsequent urbanization have resulted in overexploitation of the aquifer system and significant deterioration of groundwater quality due to seawater encroachment. The groundwate...