Post processing of zone budgets to generate improved groundwater influx estimates associated with longwall mining

Impacts of underground longwall mining on groundwater systems are commonly assessed using numerical groundwater flow models that are capable of forecasting changes to strata pore pressures and rates of groundwater seepage over the mine life. Groundwater ingress to a mining operation is typically estimated using zone budgets to isolate relevant parts of a model that represent specific mining areas, and to aggregate flows at nominated times within specific model stress periods. These rates can be easily misinterpreted if simplistic averaging of daily flow budgets is adopted. Such misinterpretation has significant implications for design of underground dewatering systems for a new mine site or it may lead to model calibration errors where measured mine water seepage rates are used as a primary calibration constraint. Improved estimates of groundwater ingress can be made by generating a cumulative flow history from zone budget data, then differentiating the cumulative flow history using a low order polynomial convolved through the data set.