Estimating Pumping Rates and Identifying Potential Recharge Zones for Groundwater Management in Multi-Aquifers System

Agricultural, aquaculture, industrial and domestic activities have placed enormous demands for water, which sometimes results in the over-pumping and associated continually declining groundwater levels. This in turn has led to land subsidence and soil salination. Therefore, it’s important to understand the local pumping activities or the pumping rates in order to implement appropriate water management. The distribution of pumping rates varies spatially and temporally due to the availability of surface water and seasonality. In addition, to have correct estimate of the pumping rates, both the hydrology and geology should be consider. SWAT and MODFLOW are employed and run separately to acquire certain hydrologic components such as the recharge, boundary flow and change of aquifer storage in multi-aquifers. The water balance method (WBM) is then adopted to estimate pumping rates with these components. To validate the proposed model the results of WBM and the official records are compared. Besides, in view of the serious land subsidence occurred, artificial recharge is regarded as an effective tool to alleviate and mitigate the subsidence. Nevertheless, the location of conducting artificial recharge needs to be identified first. The potential recharge zones are assessed based on the simulated recharge rates from SWAT and the spatial distribution of hydrological characteristics of the unconfined aquifer. Ultimately, an optimal recharge zone will be suggested. The proposed methodology is proved capable of estimating the pumping rates and locating the potential recharge zone. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013