HR: 0800h
AN: H11C-1275    [Abstracts]
TI: Groundwater Resources Assessment under the Pressures of Humanity and Climate Changes (GRAPHIC)
AU: * Taniguchi, M
EM: makoto@chikyu.ac.jp
AF: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, 335 Takashima, Kamigyo, Kyoto, 602-0878 Japan
AB: Groundwater is the major source of water across much of the world but there has been very little research on the potential effects of climate change, because of the invisibility of the phenomena and difficulty of the evaluations. Groundwater acts as a component of the global water cycle on Earth, and awareness of the importance of global groundwater issues is now increasing. In this study, the UNESCO-GRAPHIC (Groundwater Resources Assessment under the Pressures of Humanity and Climate Changes) project is introduced, and we present an overview of global groundwater issues such as the effects of climate changes and human activities on groundwater, methodologies for evaluating those effects, and a brief summary of current activities by an international scientific team in this field and the pilot projects envisaged. The pilot study assesses the effects of climate change and human activities on the subsurface environment, an important aspect of human life in the present and future but not yet evaluated. This is especially true in Asian coastal cities where population increase and concentration occurs rapidly, and uses of subsurface environment have increased. The primary goal of this pilot study is to evaluate the relationships between developmental stage of cities and various subsurface environmental problems, as extreme subsidence, groundwater contamination, and subsurface thermal anomalies. We will focus on evaluations of (1) degradation of subsurface environments and changes of reliable water resources, (2) accumulations of materials (contaminants) in subsurface environment and their transports from land to ocean, and (3) subsurface thermal anomaly due to global warming and heat island effect.
DE: 1829 Groundwater hydrology
DE: 1832 Groundwater transport
DE: 1834 Human impacts
DE: 1836 Hydrological cycles and budgets (1218, 1655)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005