Abstract
Accurate and detailed knowledge of California’s groundwater is of paramount importance for statewide water resources planning and management, and to sustain a multi-billion-dollar agriculture industry during prolonged droughts. In this study, we use water supply and demand information from California’s Department of Water Resources to develop an aggregate groundwater storage model for California’s Central Valley. The model is evaluated against 34 years of historic estimates of changes in groundwater storage derived from the United States Geological Survey’s Central Valley Hydrologic Model (USGS CVHM) and NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (NASA GRACE) satellites. The calibrated model is then applied to predict future changes in groundwater storage for the years 2015–2050 under various precipitation scenarios from downscaled climate projections. We also discuss and project potential management strategies across different annual supply and demand variables and how they affect changes in groundwater storage. All simulations support the need for collective statewide management intervention to prevent continued depletion of groundwater availability.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 12917 |
| Journal | Scientific Reports |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 1 2018 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
This research was carried out at the University of California, Irvine, and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics Space Administration. The authors would like to acknowledge the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) for the data used to derive this model, and the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling for providing groundwater storage change data (USGS and GRACE). The first author was supported by funding from the UC-Lab Fees Research Program Award 237285. Adam J. Purdy is supported by the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship 17-EARTH17R-0062.