Project description
Open-source tool for monitoring groundwater changes
Groundwater resources underpin many terrestrial and water ecosystems that humans and natural species depend on. Yet, their continued depletion on a global scale causes baseflow reduction, land subsidence and seawater intrusion, thereby deteriorating water quality. Accurate quantification of groundwater flow and storage changes is critical for adaptive resource management. Funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SubTideTools project is developing a novel methodology for quantifying hydro-geomechanical subsurface properties. The new tool will be open-source. The project will shift the paradigm of how groundwater data are used and add significant value to existing monitoring programmes, enhancing resource management decisions and improving the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive.
Objective
Groundwater resources underpin ecosystems and human activities, yet their continued global depletion causes problems including deterioration of water quality and ecology due to baseflow reduction, land subsidence and seawater intrusion. Accurate quantification of groundwater flow and storage changes is critical to enable adaptive resource management, for example through assessing potential impacts from over-extraction and determining sustainable yields. This requires detailed knowledge of groundwater systems, such as the spatial distribution and temporal variability of hydro-geomechanical (hydraulic and poroelastic) subsurface properties. Current groundwater investigation methods (such as aquifer testing) require high effort and are costly to conduct, restricting the rate and frequency of testing thus resulting in spatially limited and static outcomes. This project will develop SubTideTools (STT), a novel methodology to quantify hydro-geomechanical subsurface properties and to characterise groundwater systems using the ubiquitous Earth and atmospheric tides embedded in pore pressure measurements. STT will be developed, verified with traditional investigation techniques and released as an open source and access computational toolbox. STT will enable automated calculations of time-variable subsurface properties from existing records of groundwater and atmospheric pressure routinely acquired by global monitoring programs. The project will therefore shift the paradigm about how groundwater data are used and add significant value to existing monitoring programs, enhancing resource management decisions and improving implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive. STT directly addresses the societal challenge ‘Climate Action, Environment, Resource Efficiency and Raw Materials’ in the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (HORIZON2020).
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
76131 Karlsruhe
Germany