Monitoring groundwater level using wind turbine generated noise

Energy and water are the two most important resources for societies. As the international community continues to shy away from fossil fuels, more wind turbines are installed across the world to utilize the renewable energy source of wind. Vibrations generated from the wind turbines travel through the Earth's shallow subsurface, carrying information on both the turbine operations and the near-surface environments. We monitor vibration induced bywind farms using nodal seismometers and observe an overall agreement between vibration energy and wind speed. From the resonances of the vibrations, we extract wave speed and amplitude information, the latter of which turns out to be more sensitive to the subsurface changes and correlates well with the groundwater levels in the monitoring region.