Regional Groundwater Modeling of the Guarani Aquifer System

Since 1900, Semarang City has been meeting its industrial water needs by pumping groundwater through its underlying aquifers. The trend toward exploiting groundwater resources has driven the number of deep wells and their production capacity to increase, and therefore leads to the water table to drop from time to time, which has been marked as one of the primary causes of land subsidence there. The main aim of the current study was to numerically model the temporal and spatial evolution of groundwater table under excess abstraction so that a groundwater management strategy can be accordingly drawn up for ensuing the sustainability of groundwater resources in the future. A series of numerical simulations were carried out to take into account hydrogeological data, artificial and natural discharges of deep wells, and boundary effects in Semarang City. The groundwater modeling is calibrated under two flow conditions of the steady state from 1970 to 1990 and the transient state from 1990 to 2005 for six observation wells distributed in Semarang City. Four scenarios that reflect potential management strategies were developed, and then their effectiveness was systematically investigated. The results of our study indicate that the implementation of proper groundwater control management and measure is able to restore the groundwater level to rise back in Semarang City, and in turn achieve the sustainability of groundwater resources.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Groundwater Modelling in Urban Development to Achieve Sustainability of Groundwater Resources: A Case Study of Semarang City, Indonesia

Purnomo

Sarah

et al. 2021

“…In general, groundwater storage on the continent has not been extensively studied, and there are still regions that require more in-depth analysis of their groundwater resources [88]. Several authors have conducted various studies on the continent's groundwater resources [88][89][90][91][92][93]. However, most of these studies are focused on a local scale.…”

Section: Data Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Continental Assessment of Reservoir Storage and Water Availability in South America

Paredes-Beltran

Sordo‐Ward

de-Lama

et al. 2021

This study presents the first continental assessment of water storage and its influence on the availability of water of the river systems of South America. Although hydraulic infrastructure has the potential to cause several impacts on river systems and the environment, their relevance in water resources systems is irrefutable. The human services that dams and reservoirs provide to society, e.g., hydroelectricity, water supply, irrigation, or flood control, are vital services that society requires to develop. Despite this fact, the interactions of dams and reservoirs in the river systems of South America have not been explored from a hydrological perspective. In this study, we present the first assessment of the potential effects of water storage at a basin scale in South America. For this purpose, first we present an analysis of the current conditions and the influence of water storage in the basins of the continent. Then, we estimate the potential water availability of each basin, to evaluate the role of water storage in the availability of water in the continent. Our findings indicate that the ‘Colorado’ and ‘Negro’ basins in Argentina are the most influenced by water storage in the continent. Moreover, our results suggest that reservoirs improve the potential water availability capacity, particularly in the southern basins of the continent. With this study, we expect to provide helpful insights about the current interactions of reservoirs with the river systems of the continent.

“…However, applying the principle of parsimony [67], we balanced between complexity and practicality. Excessively complex models require levels of data that are not always available [16]. In this regard, opting for the mentioned balance led to the adoption of the following assumptions: (i) The groundwater divider coincides with surface water divider; (ii) the aquifer is horizontally isotropic; (iii) aquifer discharges occur mainly into the local hydrographic network; (iv) groundwater abstractions and surface abstractions from perennial streams were irrelevant compared to the total water volume; (v) losses from the phreatic aquifer to the confined aquifer through deep percolation are irrelevant compared to the total water volume.…”

Section: Conceptual Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Temporal and spatial variability adds to the lack of data and resources, which prevents the actions taken by managers and researchers from being correctly fulfilled when facing scenarios of overexploitation, inordinate land use, pollution, and other environmental damage [11][12][13][14]. Depending on the particularities of a region, the extent of the groundwater recharge process can go beyond even national political and administrative borders [15,16]. The territorial extension of the Brazilian Cerrado biome illustrates this very well.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Groundwater Recharge in the Cerrado Biome, Brazil—A Multi-Method Study at Experimental Watershed Scale

Santos

Koide

Távora

et al. 2020

Groundwater recharge is a key hydrological process for integrated water resource management, as it recharges aquifers and maintains the baseflow of perennial rivers. In Brazil, the Cerrado biome is an important continental recharge zone, but information on rates and spatial distribution is still lacking for this country. The objective of this work was to characterize the groundwater recharge process in phreatic aquifers of the Cerrado biome. For this, an experimental watershed representative of the referred biome was established and intensively monitored. The methodology consisted of an inverse numerical modeling approach of the saturated zone and three classic methods of recharge evaluation—hydrological modeling, baseflow separation, and water table elevation. The results indicated average potential recharge around 35% of the annual precipitation, average effective recharge around 21%, and higher rates occurring in flat areas of Ferralsols covered with natural vegetation of the Cerrado biome. As the level of uncertainty inferred from the methods was high, these results were considered a first attempt and will be better evaluated by comparison with other methods not applied in this work, such as the lysimeter and chemical tracer methods.