Case Study: Saint Johns River Water Management District improves groundwater surface modeling with Geovariances

Saint Johns River Water Management District - Customer Case Study

The St. Johns River Water Management District in northeast Florida needed to build precise boundary surfaces for hydrostratigraphic units to feed groundwater models, while also mapping consistently across political boundaries and coping with highly variable borehole coverage. They turned to Geovariances and its Isatis geostatistics software to develop a mapping procedure that could honor data points, capture both local karst-driven variability and regional structure, and remain easy to update as new data arrived.

Geovariances implemented a workflow in Isatis using local geostatistics for the well-sampled Upper Floridan Aquifer and a thickness-based kriging approach for deeper, sparsely sampled units like the Lower Floridan Aquifer. The process produced more realistic surfaces, prevented lower horizons from crossing upper ones, handled areas where units pinch out or have gaps, and was automated in batch mode for ongoing updates. As a result, the District gained a maintainable modeling method that improved consistency across the Florida peninsula and supported peer review for regulatory use.

Saint Johns River Water Management District

Jeffrey B. Davis

Saint Johns River Water Management District