H090 - Regional Groundwater Availability, Quality, and Sustainability: Processes and Methods

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Zhilin Guo, University of California Davis, Davis, CA, United States, Etienne Bresciani, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), Water Cycle Research Center, Seoul, South Korea, Chunmiao Zheng, Southern University of Science and Technology, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Shenzhen, China, Graham E Fogg, Univ California Davis, Davis, CA, United States, Clément Roques, University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France and Jan H Fleckenstein, UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

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Population growth, agriculture expansion, climate change and unsustainable water use have resulted in the degradation of groundwater availability and quality and groundwater-dependent ecosystems. While urgently needed, regional strategies for groundwater sustainability have been challenged by the complex nature of groundwater systems, which depend on multi-scale heterogeneous topography and geology, fluctuating climate, changing land use and anthropogenic forcing. Disentangling this complexity and developing adequate modeling frameworks in support of decision making is important to sustain our present and future needs in groundwater while preserving ecosystems.

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This session seeks contributions that (i) unravel the combined action of topography, geology, climate, land use and anthropogenic forcing in controlling regional groundwater availability, quality and sustainability; and (ii) propose new methods (e.g., coupled modeling approaches) for assessing and managing regional groundwater systems in diverse climatic, hydrologic, social and political settings, and accounting for uncertainty.

April 26, 2020

We can gain critical insights into the evolution of flow path connectivity during rock deformation by monitoring Helium concentration dissolved in groundwater. This is the main conclusion of our last paper which has just been published with SpringerNature in Scientific Reports: https://rdcu.be/b3Lmt

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We deployed at the Grimsel Deep Underground laboratory, Switzerland, an on-site mass spectrometer (https://gasometrix.com/) that is able to measure a panel of dissolved gases in groundwater in near-real-time. The objective was to track anomalies in noble gases that could be involved during a reservoir stimulation experiment for Enhanced Geothermal Systems.

We see great perspectives in deploying this technology for applications related to groundwater abstraction, remediation, CO2 storage, geothermal energy but also to better understand the link between seismicity and fluid migration in the Earth's crust. More is coming soon!

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Roques, C., Weber, U. W., Brixel, B., Krietsch, H., Dutler, N., Brennwald, M. S., Villiger, L., Doetsch, J., Jalali, M., Gischig, V., Amann, F., Valley, B., Klepikova, M., & Kipfer, R. (2020). In situ observation of helium and argon release during fluid-pressure-triggered rock deformation. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 6949. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-63458-x

March 29, 2020

The deep-seated landslide of Cerentino kept us busy for the last 4 years. Exceptional geomorphological feature in the beautiful landscape of Ticino, lots of cool data to analyze and a team composed of geomorphologists, structural geologists and hydrologists working together to elucidate its dynamics. In this paper, we have combined information from surface geomorphology, borehole core logging, displacement time series analysis and cosmogenic nuclide dating in order to understand the structure of the instability and discuss its dynamics and evolution over long and short timescales.

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Many thanks to Andrea for the amazing work she did for which part of the results are compiled in this paper. More coming soon! And we are indebted to the Canton of Ticino for the fruitful collaboration in this project.  

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You can download the paper here (free download offered by the journal until May 15, 2020): https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1aoBc38lp9O2N

March 17, 2020

We have a new paper out in Experiments in Fluids: "Mixing and finger morphologies in miscible non-Newtonian solution displacement" with Nicole Mehr as leading author.

You can check it out by following this link: https://rdcu.be/b22qN.

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Congrats Nicole!

July 2019

We are happy to announce that videos of lectures, practical courses, pop-up and poster presentations that were given during the 4th Cargèse Summer School 2018 “Flow and Transport in Porous and Fractured Media” are now available online on our Youtube Channel!

Enjoy the videos and stay tuned for the next edition that will happen in 2021!

October 2017

New article in Advances in Water Resources: "Improved streamflow recession parameter estimation with attention to calculation of - dQ/dt"

​During the last 2 years, we have been working on streamflow recession analysis, mainly in the Oregon Cascades. We found a lot of different methods in the literature which are used to infer recession parameters based on the time rate of change in streamflow Q as a function of Q. The choice of one method above others was complicated as we could not find any overall comparison and presentation of their respective uncertainty. This paper compiles the results of our comparison exercise along with the description of the methodology we developed which appears to provide the most robust estimates.

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Do not hesitate to ask me for the matlab code if you want analyse your streamflow data with our method.​

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September 2017

The phase III of the Aletsch project has just started with lots of exciting field campaigns during this summer! The main goal of this project is to investigate rock damage processes caused by pore pressure and temperature variations, and to understand instability mechanisms at the scale of the valley-slope in actual deglaciating environment. 

With Marc Hugentobler (PhD student) and Valentin Gischig, we were doing some logging and hydraulic tests in recently drilled boreholes. What a unique place for field work!! More information regarding the advancements of this project will be coming soon!

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Some references:

- Grämiger, Lorenz (2017), Beyond debuttressing: Thermo-hydro-mechanical rock slope damage during glacial cycles. Doctoral thesis.​

- Grämiger, L.M., Moore, J.R., Gischig, V.S., Ivy-Ochs, S., Loew, S., 2017. Beyond debuttressing: Mechanics of paraglacial rock slope damage during repeat glacial cycles. J. Geophys. Res. Earth Surf. 122, 1004–1036. doi:10.1002/2016JF003967