Quantifying the streamflow response to groundwater abstractions for irrigation or drinking water at catchment scale using SWAT and SWAT-MODFLOW

Date

2020-09-01

Author

Liu, Wei
Park, Seonggyu
Bailey, Ryan T.
Molina-Navarro, Eugenio
Andersen, Hans Estrup
Thodsen, Hans
Nielsen, Anders
Jeppesen, Erik
Jensen, Jacob Skodt
Jensen, Jacob Birk
Trolle, Dennis

Metadata

Show full item record

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

Item Usage Stats

586
views

0
downloads

Background Groundwater abstraction can cause a decline in the water table, and thereby affects surface streamflow connected to the aquifer, which may impair the sustainability of both the water resource itself and the ecosystem that it supports. To quantify the streamflow response to groundwater abstractions for either irrigation or drinking water at catchment scale and compared the performance of the widely used semi-distributed hydrological model SWAT and an recently integrated surface-subsurface model SWAT-MODFLOW, we applied both SWAT and SWAT-MODFLOW to a groundwater-dominated catchment in Denmark and tested a range of groundwater abstraction scenarios. Results To accommodate the study area characteristics, the SWAT-MODFLOW model complex was further developed to enable the Drain package and an auto-irrigation routine to be used. A PEST (parameter estimation by sequential testing)-based approach which enables simultaneous calibration of SWAT and MODFLOW parameters was developed to calibrate SWAT-MODFLOW. Both models demonstrated generally good statistical performance for the temporal pattern of streamflow, with betterR(2)andNSE(Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency) for SWAT-MODFLOW but slightly betterP(BIAS)(percent bias) for SWAT. Both models indicated that drinking water abstractions caused some degree of streamflow depletion, while abstractions for returned irrigation led to a slight total flow increase, but may influence the hydrology outside the catchment. However, the streamflow decrease caused by drinking water abstractions simulated by SWAT was unrealistically low, and the streamflow increase caused by irrigation abstractions was exaggerated compared with SWAT-MODFLOW. Conclusion We conclude that the SWAT-MODFLOW model produces much more realistic signals relative to the SWAT model when quantifying the streamflow response to groundwater abstractions for irrigation or drinking water; hence, it has great potential to be a useful tool in the management of water resources in groundwater-dominated catchments. With further development of SWAT-MODFLOW and the PEST-based approach developed for its calibration, this study would broaden the SWAT-MODFLOW application and benefit catchment managers.

Subject Keywords

Pollution

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/68568

Journal

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES EUROPE

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-020-00395-6

Collections

Ecosystem Implementation and Research Center (EKOSAM), Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Effects of operational parameters on the settling properties of activated sludge Sürücü, Gülerman; Soyupak, Salçuk (Informa UK Limited, 1989-5) Settling properties of activated sludge typically establish the performance and the cost of biological wastewater treatment plants, and they are considerably affected by the solids concentration of the sludge and the mean cell residence time of the system. In this work, effects of mean cell residence time of the system and solids concentration of sludge on the settling properties of activated sludge were studied. By statistical analysis of the laboratory data, mathematical expressions were suggested to e...
Quantifying the effects of climate change on hydrological regime and stream biota in a groundwater-dominated catchment: A modelling approach combining SWAT-MODFLOW with flow-biota empirical models Liu, Wei; Bailey, Ryan T.; Andersen, Hans Estrup; Jeppesen, Erik; Nielsen, Anders; Peng, Kai; Molina-Navarro, Eugenio; Park, Seonggyu; Thodsen, Hans; Trolle, Dennis (Elsevier BV, 2020-11-01) Climate change may affect stream ecosystems through flow regime alterations, which can be particularly complex in streams with a significant groundwater contribution. To quantify the impacts of climate change on hydrological regime and subsequently the stream biota, we linked SWAT-MODFLOW (A model coupling the Soil and Water Assessment Tool and the Modular Finite-difference Flow Model) with flow-biota empirical models that included indices for three key biological taxonomic identities (fish, macroinvertebra...
Tracking transformation processes of organic micropollutants in aquatic environments using multi-element isotope fractionation analysis Hofstetter, Thomas B.; Bolotin, Jakov; Skarpeli-Liati, Marita; Wijker, Reto; Kurt, Zöhre; Nishino, Shirley F.; Spain, Jim C. (Elsevier BV, 2011-06-01) The quantitative description of enzymatic or abiotic transformations of man-made organic micropollutants in rivers, lakes, and groundwaters is one of the major challenges associated with the risk assessment of water resource contamination. Compound-specific isotope analysis enables one to identify (bio)degradation pathways based on changes in the contaminants' stable isotope ratios even if multiple reactive and non-reactive processes cause concentrations to decrease. Here, we investigated how the magnitude ...
Modeling natural attenuation of petroleum hydrocarbons (btex) in heterogeneous aquifers Uçankuş, Tuğba; Ünlü, Kahraman; Department of Environmental Engineering (2005) Natural Attenuation can be an effective cleanup option for remediation of Groundwater contamination by BTEX. One of the important aspects of the methodology that has been recognized recently is that mass removal rates, the most important parameters used to determine effectiveness of the methodology, is controlled by groundwater flow regime, which to a large extent controlled by aquifer heterogeneity. Considering this recognition, the primary objective of this research is to quantitatively describe the relat...
Determination of thmfp of the reservoirs in Turkey : kinetics aspect Artuğ, Mine; Dilek, Filiz Bengü; Department of Environmental Engineering (2004) Chlorine is still the most commonly used disinfectant in many water treatment plants all over the World. However, studies conducted demonstrated that the chlorine reacts with the natural organic matter (NOM) in source waters, and leads to the formation of a variety of chlorinated organic compounds, disinfection by-products (DBPs). Among these, the most common are the trihalomethanes (THMs). In this study, kinetics of the THM formation was investigated. Kinetic experiments were carried out with the raw water...

Citation Formats

W. Liu et al., “Quantifying the streamflow response to groundwater abstractions for irrigation or drinking water at catchment scale using SWAT and SWAT-MODFLOW,” ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES EUROPE, pp. 0–0, 2020, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/68568.