Volumetric soil profile modeling using geo-statistics and GIS: case study Kuwait Sabkha

Geo-statistics techniques showed high applicability in fields related to geotechnical engineering like mining and petroleum engineering. Hence, this paper introduces direct application of Geo-statistics in Geotechnical engineering which is 3D soil profiling. It introduces Geo-statistics as a concept and shows the practical implementation of these techniques on modeling soil profile using CPT sample data through the integration between GIS and a specialized 3D Geo-statistical modeling software called Sgems (Stanford Geo-statistical modeling software). Using 30 CPT logs in Sabkha soil from the data of Soil Works for a costal Housing Project located approximately 25 km west of Kuwait city, and a semi-automated workflow, the 3D model was produced on Sgems and converted to GIS. The ESRI-ArcGIS software was used in querying 3D soil profile and in producing 3D section in-spite of its limitation in 3D Voxel representation.