Methodological Problems of Assessing Spatial and Temporal Changes in the Quality of Mine Water

An important, but largely neglected hydrogeological issue is the timing of mine water sampling during mining and after mine closure. Significant temporal and spatial changes in the "ageing" of information, neglected effects of dynamic changes in the quality of mine water and its resources are causing severe degradation of information from mine water analyses and their possible misleading interpretation. Hydrogeological data are typical examples of multi-parametric information and if any hydrogeochemical data bases and their further processing are to be undertaken it is advisable to use methods of multi-parametric analyses followed by hydrogeochemical reaction models. Another limiting factor affecting the validity of results is the assessment of the issue of the representativeness of samples. The methodology applied on various mining sites is widely discussed in the paper.