ENTROPY-BASED APPROACH TO REMOVE REDUNDANT MONITORING WELLS IN REGIONAL-SCALE GROUNDWATER SYSTEM IN HEBEI PLAIN, CHINA

Removing the redundancy is one of the purposes of optimizing monitoring network, for redundant data made the data-noises and increased the operation cost. The main solution to remove redundancy is reduction of the number of monitoring wells under the precondition: there is no or few effect on the ability of information collected by network. A new approach based entropy for optimization was presented in this paper. This procedure is a three-phase method, in which the entropy was employed to measure the ability of individual station and the information transfer coefficient between well pairs was considered as a measurement of information relationships. The different statistical relationships were found between the information transfer coefficients and the distances among wells located at different geological deposits, which is the base to determine the redundant wells. This approach was demonstrated using the data from the regional-scale groundwater flow system in Hebei plain, China, 36 wells in 140 wells distributed whole area were identified as the redundant wells. And the abilities of information collected were almost the same as that before even though the 36 wells were removed.