Quantifying renewable groundwater stress with GRACE

By A. Richey, B. Thomas, M. Lo, John Thomas Reager, James S. Famiglietti, K. Voss, S. Swenson, Matthew Rodell. Water Resources Research, 2015

748 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Groundwater is an increasingly important water supply source globally. Understanding the amount of groundwater used versus the volume available is crucial to evaluate future water availability. We present a groundwater stress assessment to quantify the relationship between groundwater use and availability in the world's 37 largest aquifer systems. We quantify stress according to a ratio of groundwater use to availability, which we call the Renewable Groundwater Stress ratio. The impact of quantifying groundwater use based on nationally reported groundwater withdrawal statistics is compared to a novel approach to quantify use based on remote sensing observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission. Four characteristic stress regimes are defined: Overstressed, Variable Stress, Human‐dominated Stress, and Unstressed. The regimes are a function of the sign of use (positive or negative) and the sign of groundwater availability, defined as mean annual recharge. The ability to mitigate and adapt to stressed conditions, where use exceeds sustainable water availability, is a function of economic capacity and land use patterns. Therefore, we qualitatively explore the relationship between stress and anthropogenic biomes. We find that estimates of groundwater stress based on withdrawal statistics are unable to capture the range of characteristic stress regimes, especially in regions dominated by sparsely populated biome types with limited cropland. GRACE‐based estimates of use and stress can holistically quantify the impact of groundwater use on stress, resulting in both greater magnitudes of stress and more variability of stress between regions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5503e1a6b1e0e6ca6d5e742d4685473b4247bca3

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Citations in the corpus

Reassessing the projections of the World Water Development Report (2019, background): “Challenges more severe than global are expected at regional and local scales.(16) Coastal zones have special problems.”
Quantifying and reducing leakage errors in the JPL RL05M GRACE mascon solution (2016, background): “…[Luthcke et al., 2013; Shepherd et al., 2012; Velicogna, 2009], rates of groundwater depletion in water-stressed regions across the globe [Richey et al., 2015; Famiglietti et al., 2011; Rodell et al., 2009], unraveling terms in the sea level budget [Reager et al., 2016; Llovel et al.,…”
Global unsustainable virtual water flows in agricultural trade (2019, background): “Indeed, irrigation water withdrawals may also deplete freshwater stocks (both surface water bodies and aquifers) when their abstraction rates exceed those of natural recharge (Wada et al 2010, Famiglietti 2014, AghaKouchak et al 2015, Richey et al 2015, Rodell et al 2018,Wang et al 2018).”
Spatial prediction of groundwater spring potential mapping based on an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system and metaheuristic optimization (2018, background): “…is a major source of drinking water for around 2 bil- Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. lion people (Richey et al., 2015), and in agriculture, about 278.8 million ha of agricultural lands are irrigated by groundwater (Siebert et al., 2013).”
Non-renewable groundwater use and groundwater depletion: a review (2019, methodology): “As has been shown in previous studies (Gleeson et al 2015, Richey et al 2015a), there is enormous uncertainty in estimates of global groundwater stocks aswell as in regional assessments.”