Propagation of drought through groundwater—a new approach using linear reservoir theory

Abstract

Abstract:The effect of drought on groundwater heads and discharge is often complex and poorly understood. Therefore the propagation of a drought from groundwater recharge to discharge and the influence of aquifer characteristics on the propagation was analysed by tracking a drought in recharge through a linear reservoir. The recharge was defined as a sinusoid function with a period of 1 year. The decrease in recharge owing to drought was simulated by multiplying the recharge during 1 year with a drought fraction between 0 and 1, which represents a decrease in the recharge of 100 to 0%, respectively. The droughts were identified using the threshold level approach, with a threshold that is constant in time. For this case analytical formulations were derived, which express the drought duration and deficit in the groundwater discharge in terms of the decrease in recharge, the reservoir coefficient that characterizes aquifer properties and the height of the threshold level. The results showed that the delay in the groundwater system caused a shift of the main part of the decrease in recharge from the high-flow to the low-flow period. This resulted in an increase in drought deficit for discharge compared with the drought deficit for recharge. Also the development of multiyear droughts caused an increase in drought deficit. The attenuation in the groundwater system caused a decrease in drought deficit. In most cases the net effect of these processes was an increase of drought deficit as a result of the propagation through groundwater. Only for small droughts the deficit decreased from recharge to discharge. The amount of increase or decrease depends on the reservoir coefficient and the severity of the drought. Under most conditions a maximum in the drought deficit occurred for a reservoir coefficient of around 200 days.

Groundwater-dependent ecosystems: recent insights from satellite and field-based studies

“…Groundwater pumping of aquifers often increases during severe droughts for urban, agriculture, livestock, and industry needs. This results in the decline of groundwater levels and the decrease in groundwater discharge to springs, surface water bodies and riparian zones (Peters et al, 2003). Leblanc et al (2009) attempted to attribute groundwater loss during the recent drought in the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia to groundwater pumping.…”

“…obligate or facultative phreatophyte; or plant functional type (obligate wetland, shallow-rooted or deep-rooted riparian, transitional riparian, or upland; Pockman and Sperry, 2000;Baird and Maddock, 2005;Baird et al, 2005). The result of groundwater depletion has distinct effects on the vegetation in each functional type.…”

Future discharge drought across climate regions around the world modelled with a synthetic hydrological modelling approach forced by three general circulation models

“…For water resources, it is particularly relevant how meteorological and soil moisture droughts propagate into hydrological drought (e.g. Peters et al, 2003;Tallaksen et al, 2009;Van Loon and Van Lanen, 2012). At large scales, global hydrological models (GHMs) are used to produce runoff time series, which are then used for hydrological drought assessment.…”

Multiscale evaluation of the Standardized Precipitation Index as a groundwater drought indicator

“…While there are many studies that have focused on analyzing the propagation of meteorological droughts through the hydrologic systems for improved process understanding of the evolution of hydrologic (groundwater) droughts (e.g., Eltahir and Yeh, 1999;Peters et al, 2003Peters et al, , 2005Peters et al, , 2006Tallaksen et al, 2006Tallaksen et al, , 2009Weider and Boutt, 2010;Vicente-Serrano et al, 2012;Bloomfield and Marchant, 2013;Haslinger et al, 2014;López-Moreno et al, 2013;Van Loon et al, 2014), there is still a lack of comprehensive observation-based studies to verify whether hydrological drought proxies, like precipitation-based indices (SPI) and gridded data products, are suitable for groundwater drought monitoring at regional to local scales relevant for water management. In recent years there have been some efforts to analyze the relationship between meteorological and groundwater-based drought indices (Bloomfield and Marchant, 2013;Folland et al, 2015;Bachmair et al, 2015).…”