Influence of Shallow Groundwater Evapotranspiration on Recharge Estimation Using the Water Table Fluctuation Method

Abstract

Groundwater is a vital resource for both natural ecosystems and humans (Wada et al., 2014). Over 2 billion people rely on groundwater as their main freshwater resource (Famiglietti, 2014). Groundwater is also extensively used in irrigated agriculture (Siebert et al., 2010). The increased water extraction to satisfy human needs has led to groundwater depletion in many parts of the world (Aeschbach-Hertig & Gleeson, 2012;Rodell et al., 2009;Scanlon et al., 2007). Given these evolving challenges, which are expected to get worse with increasing population, assessment of groundwater recharge, that is, the amount of water that replenishes aquifers after escaping the vadose zone , is crucial for sustainable management and development of groundwater resources (Moon et al., 2004). Groundwater recharge is, however, an inherently complex process controlled by multiple factors including climate, geomorphology, vegetation characteristics and antecedent soil moisture conditions, among others (De Vries & Simmers, 2002). Several methods to obtain estimates of groundwater recharge exist, including those based on direct measurements (Flint et al., 2002) and indirect methods that often use empirical models (Reitz & Sanford, 2020), physically based land surface models (

Explaining the Mechanism of Multiscale Groundwater Drought Events: A New Perspective From Interpretable Deep Learning Model

“…The empirical method is typically suited for investigating large-scale regions, as the uncertainties associated with regional climate in smaller catchments and the complexities of the confluence process make empirical evaluation challenging. Consequently, methods that analyze time series of GWLs, such as water table fluctuation method (Bloomfield et al, 2015;Boumis et al, 2022) and wavelets analysis (Serravalle Reis Rodrigues et al, 2023), can identify underlying temporal patterns and correlations in the data, thereby assisting in the assessing and warning of groundwater drought events in specific (Gullacher et al, 2023). Another strategy for assessing groundwater drought involves analyzing different types of drought indicators to understand how they propagate to groundwater droughts.…”