Coupled Surface and Groundwater Hydrological Modeling in a Changing Climate

Abstract

Many current watershed modeling efforts now incorporate surface water and groundwater for managing water resources since the exchanges between groundwater and surface water need a special focus considering the changing climate. The influence of groundwater dynamics on water and energy balance components is investigated in the Snake River Basin (SRB) by coupling the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) and MODFLOW models (VIC-MF) for the period of 1986 through 2042. A 4.4% increase in base flows and a 10.3% decrease in peak flows are estimated by VIC-MF compared to the VIC model in SRB. The VIC-MF model shows significant improvement in the streamflow simulation (Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency [NSE] of 0.84) at King Hill, where the VIC model could not capture the effect of spring discharge in the streamflow simulation (NSE of -0.30); however, the streamflow estimates show an overall decreasing trend. Two climate scenarios representing median and high radiative-forcings such as representative concentration pathways 4.5 and 8.5 show an average increase in the water table elevations between 2.1 and 2.6 m (6.9 and 8.5 feet) through the year 2042. The spatial patterns of these exchanges show a higher groundwater elevation of 15 m (50 feet) in the downstream area and a lower elevation of up to 3 m (10 feet) in the upstream area. Broadly, this study supports results of previous work demonstrating that integrated assessment of groundwater-surface water enables stakeholders to balance pumping, recharge and base flow needs and to manage the watersheds that are subjected to human pressures more sustainably.

Assessing the response of groundwater quantity and travel time distribution to 1.5, 2 and 3 degrees global warming in a mesoscale central German basin

“…This finding is consistent with a previous finding that low flows are expected to increase slightly in this region under future climate scenarios , considering that baseflow is the main component of low flow and recharge feeds the baseflow (Marx et al, 2018). Similar increasing trend in climate-induced recharge rates has been suggested by many researchers for other regions such as a northern European catchment (Treidel et al, 2012), high plains of USA (Cornaton, 2012), upper Colorado catchment (Tillman et al, 2016) and Snake River basin (Sridhar et al, 2017). Meanwhile, the seasonal pattern of recharge can be significantly modified by climate change (Chen et al, 2018).…”

Precipitation Extremes and Flood Frequency in a Changing Climate in Southeastern Virginia

“…The GCMs were selected based on the availability of CMIP5 MACA output (Abatzoglou 2013) at a daily time step to evaluate how daily extreme rainfall was captured during the historical period . This dataset was subsequently used to predict the changes in the future precipitation regimes in several studies (Sridhar and Anderson 2017;Sridhar et al 2018). We selected 15 GCMs to address and to get the overall understanding of the extremes while considering the inter-model uncertainties JAWRA JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCIATION resulting from a range of parameters in simulating precipitation at 1/16th-degree spatial resolution.…”

Deriving the Reservoir Conditions for Better Water Resource Management Using Satellite-Based Earth Observations in the Lower Mekong River Basin

“…The VIC model provides only the fluxes for each grid at a daily time step based on the forcing parameters; therefore, to extract the accumulated effect at the particular location, a separate routing scheme developed by Lohmann et al [54,55] was employed. The VIC model has been used by various studies for hydrological assessment [36,[56][57][58][59][60][61]. The routing scheme explicitly routes the surface and subsurface flow within a grid using a unit hydrograph that contributes to a channel network where the node of the channel network represents each grid cell of the VIC model and linearized Saint-Venant equation [62,63].…”