Training
An overview of geostatistics for contaminated site characterization
Objectives
Understand how geostatistics can support the diagnosis and remediation of polluted sites by helping you assess sample representativeness, optimize investigation plans, account for changes of scale, integrate available information, delineate impacted zones, estimate contaminated volumes or pollutant masses, and quantify uncertainty in a heterogeneous subsurface. The seminar explains why these approaches are appropriate and how to implement them operationally.
Target audience
Stakeholders who plan, manage, or assess contaminated site remediation projects and need to understand how geostatistics can support contamination characterization and remediation decisions
Content
Understand how spatial heterogeneity affects site characterization
– Review the classical approaches used to characterize potentially polluted sites, predict contaminated soil volumes, and assess compatibility with future use.
– Compare their advantages, limitations and underlying assumptions.
– Understand the concepts of pollutant heterogeneity and spatial variability.
– Examine how spatial variability can affect the feasibility of remediation techniques.
– Review recommendations for sampling potentially polluted sites.
Understand what geostatistics brings to contamination mapping
– Review common deterministic interpolation methods and their limitations.
– Discover how kriging accounts for spatial variability and quantifies the associated uncertainty.
– Understand how site history, qualitative observations, and quantitative measurements can contribute to contamination mapping.
Improve the assessment of contaminated volumes
– Identify the risks associated with using interpolation methods to estimate contaminated volumes.
– Understand the contribution of stochastic simulations.
– See how results can express global contaminated-volume estimates and their uncertainty, as well as the local risk of exceeding cleanup levels.
Key points
Methodological exposition illustrated in the field of site cleanup in numerous application cases. Added value of the geostatistical methodology as well as its limits of use. Feedback and discussions.
Prerequisites
None.
The trainer
Meryem Meziane, PhD
Consultant, Geostatistics & Environment
Drawing on doctoral research in geostatistics applied to nuclear safety at ASNR and teaching experience at Mines Paris–PSL and Université Paris Cité, Meryem supports clients in implementing Kartotrak. She turns sampling data into reliable 3D contamination models, defensible volume estimates, and robust remediation decisions, tailored to the challenges of contaminated sites and nuclear decommissioning.
Register, or ask us first
This form handles all three: registration, a quote for yourself or your team, and questions about the content or the prerequisites.
Address
44 Avenue de Valvins, 77210 Avon, France