Identification

Title

Representing intercell lateral groundwater flow and aquifer pumping in the Community Land Model

Abstract

Representation of subsurface hydrology in global land surface models has been advanced but outstanding challenges and opportunities remain, especially in better simulating lateral groundwater flow and aquifer pumping for irrigation. This study improves the representation of groundwater in the latest version of the Community Land Model (version 5) by implementing a prognostic groundwater module that accounts for lateral groundwater flow, aquifer pumping, and conjunctive use of groundwater and surface water for irrigation. In particular, we introduce-for the first time-explicit representation of steady-state well equation in large-scale hydrological modeling. Simulations are conducted at similar to 5 km resolution over the conterminous US. Groundwater level, terrestrial water storage (TWS), and river discharge are evaluated over the major US aquifers and river basins using in situ observations of groundwater and river discharge and the TWS inferred from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. The implementation of groundwater pumping results in significant improvements in simulation of spatiotemporal water-level change over the US High Plains and Central Valley Aquifer (CVA) and that of TWS over the CVA. Improvements in river discharge over the major US river basins are also achieved but are not substantial. Furthermore, the representation of pumping leads to certain overestimation in TWS trend compared to GRACE data in regions with high groundwater withdrawals. The consideration of lateral groundwater flow provides improvements in the subsurface response to pumping and natural wet and dry cycles, particularly at the grid cell level. These results provide a basis for improved groundwater modeling over large scales.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7dj5k09

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-01-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact