Ryan Swanson

Senior Hydrogeologist
HGL

Dr. Ryan Swanson is a hydrogeologist with HydroGeoLogic, Inc. (HGL) with a Ph.D. in hydrology from the Colorado School of Mines and a B.S. in geophysics and geology from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Swanson supports HGL’s numerous PFAS investigations including Drinking Water Studies and Remedial Investigations by constructing and updating Conceptual Site Models. Dr. Swanson has fostered the development of HGL’s PFAS Community of Practice; an internal group that shares ideas, problems and solutions, and leading research related to PFAS.

---

Approaching PFAS Data – Integrating an Array of Visualizations into the Conceptual Site Model

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) consist of thousands of compounds with many applications. PFAS are emerging contaminants with evolving regulatory criteria and low health advisory levels. The low advisory levels and environmental persistence of PFAS demand engineered solutions to stabilize, restrict, or remediate impacted media. Delineating the impacts of potentially dozens of PFAS analytes is challenging and cumbersome with traditional report figures and tables. For engineered solutions to be effective, the approach for presenting PFAS data must be rethought. Our approaches include developing pie charts to highlight relative concentrations of PFAS, carefully curating visualizations of concentrations with increasing depth, principal component analysis, and analyzing PFAS with a 3-D Conceptual Site Model (CSM) framework. Having an array of tools is essential to support complex CSMs involving PFAS. We discuss how these approaches complement each other and support the creation of figures that are both data and knowledge dense.