Groundwater Mapping Using A Multi-Frequency Electromagnetic-Magnetic Helicopter System In Semi-Arid Northeast Brazil

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Northeast Brazil is home to some 25 million people living in a 1 million km area, and is often referred to as the most densely populated semi-arid region on earth. Once every decade, on average, it is subjected to a severe El-Nino related drought that can last between two and four years. These droughts are particularly devastating for the rural population by causing the disintegration of the main life-sustaining activity in the region: subsistence agriculture. When droughts occur, a large proportion of the population, mostly the young working-age men, migrate out of the region, leaving the women, children and the elderly to cope with hunger and diseases, and to become totally dependent on inadequate government food and water distribution programs. The Northeastern Brazil Groundwater Project (2000-2003), also known as PROASNE, is a technology transfer program funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) designed to help develop the region’s groundwater resources as a means of augmenting the long-term water supply for the rural communities, thus reducing the hardship caused drought and improving living conditions in general. But developing the groundwater resources in northeast Brazil poses special challenges due to the fact that groundwater is not plentiful and is difficult to find in the prevailing hard and impermeable Precambrian crystaline bedrock that underlies most of the region. Also contributing to the problem is the low precipitation and very high evaporation rates; the fact that surface waters are mostly polluted and groundwater is generally brackish and unfit for human consumption without treatment; an inadequate supply of energy to pump, transport and treat water; and a strikingly poor and uninformed population, generally unaware of the basic principles of water conservation, surface and groundwater protection, safe farming practices, etc. The approach taken by PROASNE is to transfer state-of-the-art technologies in the field of groundwater exploration and management to specific Brazilian institutions, and to provide the communities with appropriate education and environmental training. PROASNE, in operations since April 2000, has already achieved significant success and is regarded as a model program both at CIDA and at NRCan, and by the principal Brazilian partner institutions.