Lab

József and Erzsébet Tóth Endowed Hydrogeology Chair


About the lab

The main aim of this Chair is to improve the state and position of the so-called modern hydrogeology which integrates the Tóthian basin hydraulics, groundwater flow systems and their related surface and subsurface manifestations and their practical application.

Featured research (2)

Lake Velence is a shallow soda lake in Hungary whose water budget is mainly driven by precipitation and evaporation. The lake has shown a deteriorating tendency recently, including extremely low lake levels and poor water quality, which indicates its vulnerability against changing climatic conditions. At the same time several water usage conflicts appeared in the catchment area. Until recently, the groundwater component in the lake's water budget and the hydrogeological processes in the catchment area have not been taken into consideration. Recent hydrogeological studies, however, show groundwater discharge into the lake. Thus, further investigating this question is of high importance, hence groundwater could reduce climatic vulnerability. Our ongoing work aims at developing a model-based evaluation technique, utilizing all map-based geophysical information and time series of different satellite data products, having sufficient spatial resolution and providing information about parameters strongly connected to subsurface processes, showing up on the surface. The basic DEM raster layer is imported from Copernicus GLO-30 dataset, having vertical precision <4 m. The Region Of Interest is a rectangular part of the catchment area: 47.1-47.4N, 18.4-18.8E. The first segmentation of the ROI is done using elevation data combined with lithographic and soil type information, resulting in almost uniform Voronoi-like polygon tessellation, with cells classified by geostructure. Further refinement by land cover type is done using Sentinel-1 SAR data. Other fixed data of point and polygon layers are important terrain features, points of surface inflows, (known) water takeouts and monitoring wells. The machine learning regression model has time series of measured data at all its layers, daily input from Agárd meteorological station, like precipitation, average temperature, wind speed and relative humidity. Another important input data comes from Sentinel-2 (GREEN-NIR)/(GREEN+NIR)=NDWI spectral index, available in about weekly time steps, varying between 2 days-2 weeks. A crucial feature of all remote sensing data used here is the spatial resolution being better (10 m) or similar to the resolution of the basic DEM model. During training a graph neural network is generated dynamically from the Voronoi tessellation, where cells are nodes and

Lab head

Judit Mádl-Szőnyi
Department
  • Department of Physical and Applied Geology
About Judit Mádl-Szőnyi
  • Judit Mádl-Szőnyi works at the Department of Physical and Applied Geology, Eötvös Loránd University. She is the head of Erzsébet and József Tóth Hydrogeology Chair. Judit does research in Hydrogeology, her main interest is about regional groundwater flow. Her current projects are about groundwater flow and heat transport at the margin of unconfined and confined carbonate sequences, biofilm and carbonate precipitation around thermal springs and significance of regional pressure conditions in geothermal an hydrocarbon exploration.

Members (17)

Ádám Tóth
  • Utrecht University
Anita Erőss
  • Eötvös Loránd University
József Tóth
  • Eötvös Loránd University
Katalin Csondor
  • Eötvös Loránd University
Petra Baják
  • Eötvös Loránd University
Szilvia Simon
  • Eötvös Loránd University
József Tóth
  • University of Alberta
Márk Szijártó
  • Eötvös Loránd University