Abstract
Seawater intrusion has often resulted in scarce fresh groundwater resources in coastal lowlands. Careful management is essential to avoid the overexploitation of these vulnerable fresh groundwater resources, requiring detailed information on their spatial occurrence. Airborne electromagnetics (EM) has proved a valuable tool for efficient mapping of ground conductivity, as a proxy for fresh groundwater resources. Stakeholders are, however, interested in groundwater salinity, necessitating a translation of ground conductivity to groundwater salinity. This paper presents a methodology to construct a high-resolution (50 × 50 × 0.5 m3) 3D voxel model of groundwater chloride concentration probability, based on a large-scale (1800 km2, 9640 flight line kilometres) airborne EM survey in the province of Zeeland, the Netherlands. Groundwater chloride concentration was obtained by combining pedotransfer functions with detailed lithological information. The methodology includes a Monte Carlo based forward uncertainty propagation approach to quantify the inherent uncertainty in the different steps. Validation showed good correspondence both with available groundwater chloride analyses, and with ground-based hydrogeophysical measurements. Our results show the limited occurrence of fresh groundwater in Zeeland, as 75% of the area lacks fresh groundwater within 15 m below ground surface. Fresh groundwater is mainly limited to the dune area and sandy creek ridges. In addition, significant fresh groundwater resources were shown to exist below saline groundwater, where infiltration of seawater during marine transgressions was hindered by the presence of clayey aquitards. The considerable uncertainty in our results highlights the importance of applying uncertainty analysis in airborne EM surveys. Uncertainty in our results mainly originated from the inversion and the 3D interpolation, and was largest at transition zones between fresh and saline groundwater. Reporting groundwater salinity instead of ground conductivity facilitated the rapid uptake of our results by relevant stakeholders, thereby supporting the necessary management of fresh groundwater resources in the region.
Highlights
Fear of childbirth may reduce the womens’ pain tolerance during labour and may have impact on the mother-infant interaction
Design We studied the association between on the one hand fear of childbirth antepartum and a request for pharmacological pain relief (either remifentanil patient controlled analgesia (PCA) or epidural analgesia), and on the other hand the association between the method of pharmacological pain relief and fear of childbirth -experienced during labour- reported postpartum in women who participated in the RAVEL trial (NTR3687)
The results of our analyses suggest that women who received pharmacological pain relief more often reported experienced fear of childbirth postpartum compared to women who did not use pain relief
Summary
Fear of childbirth may reduce the womens’ pain tolerance during labour and may have impact on the mother-infant interaction. We aimed to assess (1) the association between fear of childbirth antepartum and subsequent request for pharmacological pain relief, and (2) the association between the used method of pain relief and experienced fear of childbirth as reported postpartum in low risk labouring women. One can distinguish fear of childbirth antepartum –measured during pregnancy– from fear of childbirth postpartum, which is fear experienced during labour and measured after giving birth [7]. Previous studies have shown that women with fear of childbirth had reduced pain tolerance [4, 8]. Saisto et al found that 15% of the women with fear of childbirth postpartum, mentioned experienced frightening pain as principal cause of fear [10]
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