HR: 1340h
AN: GC33B-1253    [Abstracts]
TI: Effects of climate and land use changes on coastal groundwater resources
AU: * Sarukkalige, P
EM: ranjan@kaigan.civil.tohoku.ac.jp
AF: Doctoral Student, Department of Civil Engineering, Tohoku University, Aoba 06, Sendai, 980-8579 Japan
AU: Kazama, S
EM: kazama@kaigan.civil.tohoku.ac.jp
AF: Associate Professor, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University, Aoba 20, Sendai, 980-8579 Japan
AU: Sawamoto, M
EM: sawamoto@kaigan.civil.tohoku.ac.jp
AF: Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Tohoku University, Aoba 06, Sendai, 980-8579 Japan
AB: In order to introduce the consequences of climate and land use change on coastal groundwater resources, a numerical model has been developed based on the sharp interface assumption to evaluate the saltwater intrusion in coastal aquifer systems. This model helps to study the coastal aquifers for proper understanding of the functioning of the hydro geological behavior of the aquifer systems regionally as well as globally. To investigate the factors affecting groundwater recharge, a water balance technique has been employed in order to establish the groundwater recharge as a function of annual precipitation, mean annual temperature, land use pattern and hydrologic soil condition. The proposed methodology will be useful in ungauge basins and in areas where limited hydrological data is available. The aridity index has been introduced to represent the variations in precipitation and temperature. Results show that when the aridity index is less than 22, groundwater recharge will be zero in all land use patterns. Combined climate and land use scenarios show that when aridity index is less than 60, the agricultural lands give higher groundwater recharge than other land use patterns. It concludes that with respect to groundwater recharge, agricultural lands are the best land use pattern in arid and semi arid areas. Calculated recharge was then used to estimate the freshwater-saltwater interface and percentage of freshwater loss due to salinity intrusion. We found that in arid areas, fresh groundwater loss increases as the percentage of forest cover increases. Combined effects of deforestation and aridity index show that, deforestation causes to increase the recharge and to increase the existing fresh groundwater resource in areas having less precipitation and high temperature (arid climates). The outcome of this research would assist the planners and decision makers to come up with control measures for ongoing land use practices and groundwater development activities ensuring its long-term sustainability in coastal groundwater systems.
DE: 1225 Global change from geodesy (1222, 1622, 1630, 1641, 1645, 4556)
DE: 1632 Land cover change
SC: Global Climate Change [GC]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005