Serra Geral fractured aquifer and the uncertainties of geospatial models: A case study in the caxias fault zone

In hydrogeology, geospatial interpolators are commonly used to simulate water table distribution, contaminant concentrations and aquifer vulnerability. However, few are the studies that demonstrate which interpolator best suits the dataset. This study targets on this knowledge gap by assessing the geospatial dependency influence, the scale influence and the intrinsic uncertainties of the score over the deterministic and stochastic models in the Serra Geral Fractured Aquifer System. The hydrogeological parameters considered as reference for this assess-ment were the Potentiometric Surface, Fracture Flow Zones, Static Level, Discharge, Transmissivity and Specific Capacity. The Potentiometric Surface and Fracture Flow Zones parameters have demonstrated a strong spatial dependence on the geomorphology and regional lithostratigraphy, whilst the Static Level, Discharge, Trans-missivity and Specific Capacity have showed less spatial dependence and with the worst scores of the consistency indexes. The scale of this study has had little influence on the geospatial models. When using interpolation to generate geospatial models, one should perform an evaluation of the spatial dependency, the mean bias, the shared variance score between observed and simulated dataset and the statistical difference between the scores of the Pearson Correlation prior to choose the most adequate interpolator.