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Continental-scale interpretation of airborne electromagnetics. Supporting regional groundwater systems understanding and management.

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

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In Australia, widespread sedimentary basin and regolith cover host groundwater resources while obscuring underlying hydrostratigraphic units of interest, presenting challenges for hydrogeologists, environmental managers, communities, and decision makers. As an attempt to address these challenges, we interpret conductivity-depth models derived from Geoscience Australia’s 20 km line-spaced AusAEM airborne electromagnetic (AEM) data and other AEM state and industry-flown surveys. Integration of AEM conductivity sections with supporting information such as boreholes, geophysics, surface and subsurface geology maps, and stratigraphic unit information facilitates the production of chronostratigraphic AEM interpretations. These interpretations help characterise the near-surface geology to depths of up to ~300 m. Homogenous layered chronostratigraphic interpretation of AEM conductivity sections currently covers over 115,000 line-km, providing consistently formatted line segments (~30,000) or depth estimate points (600,000) across approximately 27% of the Australian continent, or 46% of the 20km line-spaced data. Furthermore, rich stratigraphic, confidence and other interpretation-specific metadata are attributed to these interpretations. These interpretations provide a multidisciplinary tool for a range of uses. In a groundwater context, they offer valuable information about palaeovalley presence, morphology, hydrostratigraphic unit distribution, structure and depth, and can also support interpretations of groundwater flow direction, salinity and availability. The data are available in multiple formats compatible with a wide range of software packages, providing extensive data to academia, government and industry. Applications include regional hydrogeological studies, water resource identification, extraction and management, management of groundwater dependent ecosystems, and mapping seawater intrusion. Presented at the 2025 International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH) Conference

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title Continental-scale interpretation of airborne electromagnetics. Supporting regional groundwater systems understanding and management.
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/en/dataset/aa1cbcfd-5952-45bb-ae60-c73ccc98cd0f
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Continental-scale interpretation of airborne electromagnetics. Supporting regional groundwater systems understanding and management.". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/continental-scale-interpretation-of-airborne-electromagnetics-supporting-regional-groundwater-s