Assessing Long‐Term Changes in Regional Groundwater Recharge Using a Water Balance Model for New Mexico

Abstract

In New Mexico in the arid southwestern United States, groundwater recharge is crucial to sustain groundwater (GW), which is vitally important to life, agriculture, industry, and ecosystems. To better understand the changes in recharge statewide, we explored the changes in groundwater recharge (RE), precipitation (P), surface water inflow (SW in ), outflow (SW out ), diversions (SW div ), returns (SW ret ), and surface water and GW evapotranspiration (SW E and GW ET ) in five New Mexico counties: Taos, Torrance, Do ña Ana, Eddy, and Lea during 1975-2015. The results show that the change-point of RE was in the 1990s, leading to contrasting tendencies in RE before and after the change-point with a decreasing rate during the latter one. There was a significant positive relationship between RE and P for Taos. The highest contribution rate (CR) to RE was SW out for Taos, whereas GW ET ranked as the top CR for the other counties. Furthermore, the annual CR of GW ET to RE increased significantly in all counties except Lea. The above results reveal that P and surface water flows played the dominant role in impacting RE in northern New Mexico where surface water is the primary local water resources, whereas GW ET had the highest and increasingly continuous influence in central and southern New Mexico where the surface water is much less than that in northern New Mexico. This study shows that water budgets are important to identify differences in regional hydrological regimes that affect planning to maintain RE to groundwater.

A Water Balancing Act: Water Balances Highlight the Benefits of Community-Based Adaptive Management in Northern New Mexico, USA

“…If surface water river flows continue to decrease, then acequia water availability and the acequia-irrigated landscape will decrease, as will regular DP and groundwater recharge [60]. As a mechanism that temporarily stores surface water in the subsurface which eventually returns to the river system as delayed return flow, DP can serve as a very important buffer against climate change; however, mean recharge in Taos County first significantly decreased in 1996 [61]. Baseflow is also an extremely critical element of the hydrologic regime in the Upper Rio Grande Basin where baseflow contributions account for 49% of total discharge upstream of Albuquerque, New Mexico [56].…”

Temporal and Spatial Patterns of Groundwater Recharge Across a Small Watershed in the California Sierra Nevada Mountains

“…Governing equations can also be derived to reflect a variety of control volumes, from a column of soil (i.e., soil-water-balance) to an entire watershed (Healy et al, 2007). Additionally, as long-term climatic and hydrologic input data have become more readily available, recent water budget applications have facilitated new time series analyses of recharge (Dubois et al, 2021;Li et al, 2021).…”