Industry collaboration leads to fiber-optic-based detection of ground water table variability in Louisiana

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is a new method able to turn any fiber optical cable into a series of detectors to measure ground vibration data. Worldwide implementations have shown that recorded data can be used to measure the Seismic Ambient Noise due to a variety of sources such as trains, traffic,  etc. Thanks to a $40k Proof of Concept / Prototype (PoC/P) Initiative which has been awarded to Rui Zhang (School of Geosciences) and Gabriele Morra (Department of Physics), this approach will now be used for the first time in Louisiana to monitor ground water table variation using a portion of a local cable located in Lafayette. The project is in collaboration with the local company Silixa which will provide UL Lafayette researchers with the iDAS equipment necessary to record noise data. If successful, this test could be duplicated in other regions of the State, through a collaboration with the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) cable network, with potential applications in geo and environmental sciences. Three graduate students from the College of Sciences of UL Lafayette will be involved with data collection and processing.