No abstract

Deltaic groundwater resources are often vulnerable to degradation from seawater intrusion or through interaction with saline paleowaters. The Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna River delta, in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, is a particularly vulnerable area with an estimated 20 million coastal inhabitants directly affected by saline drinking water. The shallow groundwater of the coastal regions is primarily brackish with pockets of fresher water. A small-scale hydrologic investigation of groundwater salinity beneath an embanked tidal channel island was undertaken to explore possible hydrogeological explanations of the distribution of water salinities in the shallow aquifer. This study employs a combination of 3 H and 14 C dating, electromagnetic subsurface mapping, and a 2-D solute transport model. The authors conclude that the shallow groundwater salinity can best be explained by the slow infiltration of meteoric water into paleobrackish estuarine water that was deposited during the early-mid Holocene.

This study explores the relationship between municipal water use and an array of climate, economic, behavioral, and policy variables across the contiguous U.S. The relationship is explored using Bayesian‐hierarchical regression models for over 2,500 counties, 18 covariates, and three higher‐level grouping variables. Additionally, a second analysis is included for 83 cities where water price and water conservation policy information is available. A hierarchical model using the nine climate regions (product of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) as the higher‐level groups results in the best out‐of‐sample performance, as estimated by the Widely Available Information Criterion, compared to counties grouped by urban continuum classification or primary economic activity. The regression coefficients indicate that the controls on water use are not uniform across the nation: e.g., counties in the Northeast and Northwest climate regions are more sensitive to social variables, whereas counties in the Southwest and East North Central climate regions are more sensitive to environmental variables. For the national city‐level model, it appears that arid cities with a high cost of living and relatively low water bills sell more water per customer, but as with the county‐level model, the effect of each variable depends heavily on where a city is located.