Assessing the impacts of climate change on sustainable management of coastal aquifers

Date

2014-09-01

Author

UNSAL, Burcu
Yagbasan, Ozlem
Yazıcıgil, Hasan

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

232
views

0
downloads

Water is a vital resource for the survival of not only human population, but also almost all ecosystems. Constituting 30 % of all freshwater, groundwater is the main source of available freshwater. Coastal aquifers, which serve as the major freshwater source for densely populated zones, are of vital importance and quite vulnerable to climate change. This paper examines the significant consequences of climate change, decreasing recharge rates, sea-level rise and increasing freshwater demand on the sustainable management of coastal aquifers, via a hypothetical case study. A 3-D numerical model is developed using SEAWAT, to simulate a circular island aquifer in the form of a freshwater lens surrounded by saltwater. Issues such as sloping land surface resulting in landward migration of the coastal boundary and transient response of the system due to pumping are considered through a set of predictive simulations. To assess the sensitivity of the model results to important parameters, a sensitivity analysis is performed. Results of this research, revealing the effects of mentioned pressures on the long-term sustainability of the freshwater resource, are evaluated on the basis of groundwater reserves and intrusion of the freshwater-saltwater interface in lateral and vertical directions. These outcomes are further used to determine the sustainable pumping rate of the system, considering both quantity and quality of the groundwater resources.

Subject Keywords

Global warming, Island aquifers, Sea-level rise, Groundwater management, Seawater intrusion, Sustainability

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/31989

Journal

ENVIRONMENTAL EARTH SCIENCES

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-014-3130-z

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Comparison of numerical models and application to tropical cyclone Dorian Ömeroğlu, Gökçe; Yalçıner, Ahmet Cevdet; Department of Civil Engineering (2021-6-30) Coasts are important areas where the vast majority of the world's population lives, have important natural resources and ecosystems, and provide socio-economic opportunities for societies. However, coastal areas are under threat due to different natural disasters such as storms, tsunamis and floods that cause loss of life and property. With the rapid development of hardware and software technologies, many programs that play an important role in the assessment of the natural disasters have achieved to perfor...
Impacts of Decreasing Recharge Rates on Sustainable Groundwater Management Yazıcıgil, Hasan; Yılmaz, Koray Kamil (2010-09-04) Groundwater is a vital resource for living and food security for at least two billion people worldwide. Ever increasing demand on groundwater has led to overexploitation of the aquifers and degradation of groundwater quality. Climate change will exacerbate these problems by producing reduced recharge rates in some areas, more reliance on groundwater resources due to decrease in reliability of surface waters, farther inland penetration of saltwater intrusion in response to both sea-level rise and excessive g...
Challenges and innovations for sustainable access to good quality drinking water Goodridge, Amador; Kurt, Zöhre; Nelson, Kara; Smith, Charlotte (2018-12-12) Water is the main source of life that every single person in the world needs to survive. All Latin- American countries rely on its natural resources; much of the water used in these countries especially drinking water is retrieved from those resources. However, there is a lack of detoxification studies for its water and soil. Contamination due to agricultural activates seems to find its cause in extensive use of pesticide and herbicide which infiltrate through the water from the soil and the contamination k...
An approach to urban river rehabilitation for coexistence of river and its respective city: Porsuk river case and city of Eskişehir Şimşek, Gül; Şenyapılı, Tansı; Department of City and Regional Planning (2011) All living things mostly the humans, as builders of civilizations, have always been in intrinsic bonds with water. This interaction between water (oceans, seas, lakes, rivers etc.) and settlements has existed since ancient civilizations. Among water resources, ‘flowing waters’ such as rivers, streams, creeks, etc. have a prominent role as they are the lifeblood of most cities in terms of providing transportation, security, energy, irrigation, commerce, and recreation. By the late 19th century, developments ...
Integrated management policies for coastal archaeological environments of Turkey: Erdemli-Silifke coastal region, Mersin Naycı, Nida; Şahin Güçhan, Neriman; Department of Architecture (2010) Being important natural areas due to togetherness of terrestrial and water ecosystems; coastal araes (sea, lake and river coasts) possesses important historic and cultural environments shıowing relationship of mankind with water developed during different periods since ancient periods onwards. In this sense; having housed various civilizations since anquity onwards, Turkey has diverse and rich coastal archaeological sites. However, in addition to natural processes occuring in short and long terms due to the...

Citation Formats

B. UNSAL, O. Yagbasan, and H. Yazıcıgil, “Assessing the impacts of climate change on sustainable management of coastal aquifers,” ENVIRONMENTAL EARTH SCIENCES, pp. 2183–2193, 2014, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/31989.