REGIONAL SCALE MODELING OF SURFACE AND GROUND WATER INTERACTION IN THE SNAKE RIVER BASIN¹

Abstract

Changes in irrigation and land use may impact discharge of the Snake River Plain aquifer, which is a major contributor to flow of the Snake River in southern Idaho. The Snake River Basin planning and management model (SRBM) has been expanded to include the spatial distribution and temporal attenuation that occurs as aquifer stresses propagate through the aquifer to the river. The SRBM is a network flow model in which aquifer characteristics have been introduced through a matrix of response functions. The response functions were determined by independently simulating the effect of a unit stress in each cell of a finite difference groundwater flow model on six reaches of the Snake River. Cells were aggregated into 20 aquifer zones and average response functions for each river reach were included in the SRBM. This approach links many of the capabilities of surface and ground water flow models. Evaluation of an artificial recharge scenario approximately reproduced estimates made by direct simulation in a ground water flow model. The example demonstrated that the method can produce reasonable results but interpretation of the results can be biased if the simulation period is not of adequate duration.

A System Dynamics Model for Conjunctive Management of Water Resources in the Snake River Basin

“…Running the two models in parallel is an iterative rather than a dynamic process. One method that has been used to dynamically represent groundwater and surface water interactions is to add response functions generated from the groundwater model to the surface water planning model as was done by Miller et al (2003) for the Snake River Basin Model (SRBM) operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) (USBR, 2000). A response function is determined by stressing the groundwater model with a specified stress at a given location and then calculating response factors over a period of years to determine how that stress at a specific location impacts exchanges between the aquifer and various river reaches (Hubbell et al, 1997;Cosgrove and Johnson, 2004).…”

“…To avoid a lagged aquifer response when calculating how historic climate would impact present reservoir operations using current groundwater development, we performed a wrapped sequence simulation as suggested by Miller et al (2003). The wrapped sequence simulation runs over a period of 104 years in which the first 52 years of data from 1928 to 1979 are simulated twice, before proceeding to finish simulation of the historic period ending in 2005.…”

Conjunctive Use of Surface Water and Groundwater for Sustainable Water Management

“…Groundwater pumping for irrigation or other consumptive uses creates the opposite effect. The Snake river in southern Idaho is a prime example of a surface water system that is greatly affected by groundwater conditions which changes in response to irrigation practices (Miller et al, 2003). Integrated river basin modeling with distributed groundwater simulation and dynamic stream-aquifer interaction allows a more realistic representation of conjunctive use and the associated economic results (Velázquez et al, 2006).…”

Introduction to special section on River Basin Management: Economics, Management, and Policy

“…As water sharing issues within multijurisdictional basins are becoming critical, research focus on the international dimensions of RBM is also growing [e.g., Dinar and Wolf , 1994; Chenoweth et al , 2001; Wichelns et al , 2003]. Other issues covered in present literature relate to the RBM implications of floods [e.g., Mustafa and Wescoat , 1997; Jacobs , 1999; Shim et al , 2002], interaction between surface and sub‐surface water sources [e.g., Miller et al , 2003], catchment management and salinity [e.g., Greiner and Cacho , 2001], water quality problems from land use changes [e.g., Tong and Chen , 2002], urbanization [e.g., Randhir , 2003], and climatic change [e.g., Venema et al , 1997; Cohen et al , 2000].…”