Evaluation of groundwater renewability in the Henan Plains, China

Abstract

Copyright © 2012 by The Geochemical Society of Japan. Geological Survey of Henan Province, 2007). Therefore, there is an urgent need to improve water resources management in Henan Plains. Hydrogeological information such as total resources and renewal rate of groundwater (i.e., the ratio between the annual recharge and the total reserve) is essential for improving water resources management (Le Gal La Salle et al., 2001). Estimations of the recharge and annual renewal rate are very difficult, when based only on traditional hydrogeological methods such as water budget, groundwater balance or Darcy’s law, because these methods often require large volumes of hydrometeorologic data collected over considerable time span and hydrological parameters which are generally inadequate or unreliable in many regions (Wood and Imes, 1995; Wood and Sanford, 1995; Wood, 1999; Flint et al., 2002; Edmunds et al., 2002). Thus, isotope tracers have been proven to be extremely useful in the research of groundwater renewability (Le Gal La Salle et al., 2001; Ma and Hou, 2005). In recent years, 3H is considered to be an ideal tracer in the ground water renewal rate calculation, because 3H participates in water cycle as a component of water molecule Evaluation of groundwater renewability in the Henan Plains, China