Abstract
Growing dependence on groundwater to fulfill the water demands has led to continuous depletion of groundwater levels and, consequently, poses the maintenance of optimum groundwater and management challenge. The region of South Bihar faces regular drought and flood situations, and due to the excessive pumping, the groundwater resources are declining. Rainwater harvesting has been recommended for the region; however, there are no hydrogeological studies concerning groundwater recharge. Aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) is a managed aquifer recharge technique to store excess water in the aquifer through borewells to meet the high-water demand in the dry season. Therefore, this paper presents the hydrogeological feasibility for possible ASR installations in shallow aquifers of South Bihar with the help of flowing fluid electrical conductivity (FFEC) logging. For modeling, the well logging data of two shallow borewells (16- and 47-m depth) at Rajgir, Nalanda, were used to obtain the transmissivity and thickness of the aquifers. The estimated transmissivities were 804 m2/day with an aquifer thickness of 5 m (in between 11 and 16 m) at Ajatshatru Residential Hall (ARH) well. They were 353 and 1,154 m2/day with the aquifer thicknesses of 6 m (in between 16 and 22 m) and 2 m (in between 45 and 47 m), respectively, at Nalanda University Campus (NUC) well. Despite the acceptable transmissivities at these sites, those aquifers may not be fruitful for the medium- to large-scale (more than 100-m3/day injection rate) ASR as the thickness of the aquifers is relatively small and may not efficiently store and withdraw a large amount of water. However, these aquifers can be adequate for small (up to 20-m3/day injection rate) ASR, for example, groundwater recharge using rooftop water. For medium- to large-scale ASR, deeper aquifers need to be further explored on these sites or aquifers with similar characteristics.
Highlights
The increasing worldwide demand for water is caused by increasing irrigation demand, urbanization, industrialization, and climate change, which poses stress on groundwater resources (Bouwer, 2002; Elshall et al, 2020)
The corresponding hydraulic conductivities which were obtained using Eq 2. These figures show that the logging profile peaks between 14.5and 16-m depths were increasing consistently with pumping time normalized to the salinity of ambient groundwater, which is consistent with the conceptual model of the flowing fluid electrical conductivity (FFEC) technique
The relationship between the total mass of salt left in the wellbore as a function of time indicates that they were decreasing with pumping duration, as illustrated in Figure 5, which supports the finding of Sharma et al (2015)
Summary
The increasing worldwide demand for water is caused by increasing irrigation demand, urbanization, industrialization, and climate change, which poses stress on groundwater resources (Bouwer, 2002; Elshall et al, 2020). In India, due to the monsoon (rainy season), there is a larger availability of surface water for a short time period than groundwater. Bihar is one of the poorest states of India; the economy is mainly dependent on agriculture, which is affected by both excess rainfall and drought. It is unique in terms of its water challenges, characterized by periodic episodes of devastating floods and droughts (Yaduvanshi et al, 2015). The current trend of declining annual rainfall with increasing heavy rainfall events had further worsened the situation (Guhathakurta et al, 2020). Adoption of rainwater harvesting technology can help in mitigating the issue of waterlogging by storing excess water in aquifers and utilizing this stored water in dry seasons
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