Spatio‐temporal patterns of the interaction between groundwater and surface water in plains

Abstract

The study of the dynamics of anthropic disturbances that have an effect on the hydrological systems in plains requires integral simulation tools for their diagnosis. The objective of this article is, first, to analyse and reproduce the spatio‐temporal interactions between groundwater (GW) and surface water, net recharge, GW level, surface run‐off, and evapotranspiration in the upper creek basin of Del Azul, which is located in the centre of the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and second, to obtain insights to apply the methodology to other similar situations. For this purpose, a model coupling the semidistributed hydrological model (Soil and Water Assessment Tool [SWAT]) and the hydrogeological model (MODFLOW) has been used. A simulation was carried out for a period of 13 years (2003–2015) on a daily scale. The application of the SWAT–MODFLOW coupling gave good results based on the adjustment between the calculated flows and levels, reaching a Nash–Sutcliffe of 0.6 and R20.6 at the Seminario hydrometric station located at the watershed outlet point. According to the annual average balance, out of the total rainfall, evapotranspiration accounts for 85%, recharge accounts for 10.2%, and surface run‐off accounts for 4.8%. Annual and monthly trends of the stream–aquifer interaction were determined, obtaining on average an annual GW discharge of 34 mm and an annual average recharge of the stream to the aquifer of 1.4 mm. Monthly GW discharges are higher in winter–spring (July to December with an average of 3.3 mm) and lower in summer–autumn (January to June with an average of 2.8 mm). The monthly average recharge of the stream towards the aquifer varies from 0.02 to 0.36 mm and is higher in March, May, and August, when water excess is produced in the basin. Through the analysis of coupled modelling, it is possible to analyse and reproduce the spatio‐temporal transitions of flow existing between the stream, the hyporheic zone, and the aquifer.

BioRT-Flux-PIHM v1.0: a biogeochemical reactive transport model at the watershed scale

“…Some integration crossing disciplinary boundaries did occur in recent years. For example, SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) has a version that couples with the groundwater model MOD-FLOW and the surface water and groundwater quality model in RT3D (Bailey et al, 2017;Ochoa et al, 2020). CATHY (Catchment Hydrology) includes processes of pesticide decay (Gatel et al, 2019;Scudeler et al, 2016).…”

Assessment of Groundwater Recharge in Agro-Urban Watersheds Using Integrated SWAT-MODFLOW Model

“…The groundwater abstraction in SWAT-MODFLOW was compared with the abstraction in the SWAT model [25]. Recently the model is applied to study groundwater-surface water interaction in plains, Argentina [5].…”

Assessing Climate Change Impact on Water Resources under Water Demand Scenarios using SWAT-MODFLOW-WEAP

“…Often-used hydrologic models for IWRM include: the Soil and Water Assessment Tool [SWAT; 7], a watershed modeling code that simulates principal hydrologic fluxes on a daily time step; MODFLOW [8], a groundwater modeling code that simulates groundwater head and associated flow rates in a heterogeneous aquifer system; and, to overcome the subsurface and surface process limitations in SWAT and MODFLOW, respectively, the coupled modeling code SWAT-MODFLOW [9], which has been used in numerous studies for water supply estimation and water management e.g. [10][11][12][13]. However, these models represent the physical world (i.e., model spatial discretization and process simulation) differently and each is limited to its simulation domain, each having advantages and disadvantages when simulating biophysical processes and using computational resources [14].…”