Abstract
One of the first steps to implement a policy for groundwater resources management is knowing the groundwater recharge. However, the unavailability of data and resources to execute field studies increase the uncertainty associated with the estimation of groundwater recharge. To fill this gap, the present work aimed to propose a method to predict groundwater recharge at non-instrumented hydrographic basins. The approach proposed is based on using an abacus to execute the transposition and/or regionalization of results generated in an experimental basin. The methodology comprised the estimation and mapping of recharge rates in the experimental basin using three distinct approaches—numerical modelling of the saturated zone, distributed hydrological modelling of the vadose zone, and the method of fluctuation of the water table elevation—and the following generation of the abacus, with average recharge values for combinations of soil class, land use/cover and slope using geographic information systems. The results indicate that the abacus is consistent for some Ferrasol areas, that the reliability of average regionalized values depends on the complexity of the physical environment—soil class, land use/cover, and slope—and that new studies, focusing on the hydro-physical characterization of soils, might produce more reliable estimations.
Highlights
Despite the importance of groundwater in volume, ecology, economy, and society, the lack of knowledge about hydrogeological systems contrasts with scenarios of contamination and depletion of these systems because of inordinate exploitation [1,2,3]
“Water Table Elevation—water table elevation (WTE)” were not included in the comparison, because they perform “effective recharge” estimations [8,41] and, give lower estimations than the ones obtained with the vadose zone methods, such as SWAT-MODFLOW and WETSPA
The present work proposed an abacus to predict groundwater recharge at non-instrumented hydrographic basins elaborated from the results obtained at an experimental basin in the Cerrado biome
Summary
Despite the importance of groundwater in volume, ecology, economy, and society, the lack of knowledge about hydrogeological systems contrasts with scenarios of contamination and depletion of these systems because of inordinate exploitation [1,2,3]. According to Scanlon et al [12] and Singh et al [13], there is no universal approach to study groundwater recharge and that is why the amount of methods reported in scientific literature is high. Amongst these methods, it can be highlighted: (i) the ones based on measuring the water table level [14,15,16]; (ii) the ones that use chemical tracers [17,18,19,20,21]; (iii) the ones based on direct
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