The last couple of years, the Swedish islands Gotland and Öland has faced massive draught. In combination with the high tourist activity during the summer months, the islands groundwater supplies are set under an enormous pressure.

To meet these problems, about 37% of Gotland and 60% of Öland has been mapped with a helicopter-borne time domain electromagnetic (AEM) system. The data was acquired by SkyTEM in 2013 and 2015, and in 2016, respectively. The collecting data can be utilized to make detailed hydrogeological models of the two islands and in turn help discover new groundwater resources.

An expanding team of geologists and geophysicists at the Geological Survey of Sweden, SGU, work with these data. Together with specialists from The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and I•GIS they have made a lithologic voxel model both on Öland and Gotland consisting of app. 46 million and 74.5 million voxels, respectively! All the modelling has been made in GeoScene3D.

As a result of the work being done, based on the obtained AEM data, a new water supply on Fårö, an island north of Gotland, has been discovered. Not having to get the water transported to the island by ships anymore, the municipality has saved a lot of money.

The success of the project from Öland and Gotland, has in addition to the commercial success on Fårö, and scientific contributions (see e.g. Jørgensen et.al. 2018, Bastani et al. 2018, and Gulbrandsen et al, 2018) resulted in more SGU employees and more areas to be mapped with SkyTEM and in turn modelled in GeoScene3D.

Last month a 3-day seminar and workshop where held at SGU in Uppsala, where results were presented, and experiences exchanged both between the modelers working on Öland and Gotland and to other interested SGU and Uppsala University employees. Following the first day seminar, a 2-day workshop was held by Mats Lundh Gulbrandsen from I•GIS and Flemming Jørgensen, now, from Central Denmark Region (previously GEUS). The workshop kickstarted the modelling work in two new SkyTEM surveys in Falkenberg and Halland, and the course participants went through the modelling workflows developed for Gotland and Öland and made adjustments to the new areas. Listen to state geologist Peter Dahlqvist from SGU talk about the workshop in this radio interview.

More SkyTEM areas and modelling work has been planned in the future, and at the end of this month, a representative from I•GIS will hold a 2-day GeoScene3D introduction course at SGU in Uppsala for 5 new users of GeoScene3D!