GIS-Based Water Budget Framework for High-Resolution Groundwater Recharge Estimation of Large-Scale Humid Regions
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 19, Issue 8
Abstract
Groundwater recharge plays a vital role in replenishing aquifers, which impacts on groundwater resources availability. This paper develops a geographic information system (GIS)-based water budget framework in conjunction with a hydrologic model to derive high-resolution spatial-temporal distribution of groundwater recharge for the Southern Hills aquifer system, southwestern Mississippi, and southeastern Louisiana, United States. The framework includes parallel programming to distribute the large amount of software runs to a cluster of supercomputers to expedite computation time. Under the parallel computation, the hydrologic models are calibrated by the USGS WaterWatch runoff dataset and verified by the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) evapotranspiration dataset. A map of recharge time lag is derived to understand travel time of infiltrated precipitation reaching the last soil layer. A recharge index map is derived to quantify the percentage of precipitation that becomes groundwater recharge. The results show that the mean annual recharge rate was estimated which was 3.1% of the mean annual precipitation on the area of the Southern Hills aquifer system. High recharge rate was estimated at the outcrops of Miocene deposits in southwestern Mississippi, which are the recharge zones of the deep sands in southeastern Louisiana. This paper successfully demonstrated the applicability of the framework to groundwater recharge estimation on large-scale humid areas.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was supported in part by Grant/Cooperative Agreement No. G10AP00136 from the USGS and by the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute. The contents of the paper are solely the responsibility of the writers and do not necessarily represent the official views of the USGS. The writers acknowledge Louisiana Optical Network Initiative and Louisiana State University (LSU) High Performance Computing for providing supercomputers and technical support.
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 19 • Issue 8 • August 2014
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 9, 2013
Accepted: Feb 26, 2014
Published online: Feb 28, 2014
Published in print: Aug 1, 2014
Discussion open until: Oct 22, 2014
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