Excessive groundwater withdrawal and resultant land subsidence in the Küçük Menderes River Basin, Turkey as estimated from InSAR-SBAS and GNSS measurements

Abstract

Küçük Menderes River Basin (KMRB) is located in the western part of Turkey in the city of İzmir. The basin hosts about half a million people and 90% of the population makes their living from farming and animal husbandry. Most of the water needs for agricultural irrigation, animal husbandry, and drinking are met from groundwater resources in the basin. Since the water pumped from the aquifers cannot be naturally recharged by surface waters and precipitation, the groundwater level is rapidly receding and a decrease of up to 150 meters has been observed in the historical groundwater level time series since the 1990s. For this reason, land subsidence occurred in the basin and as a result of this, crustal surface cracks have formed and infrastructure and superstructure facilities have been endangered. To prevent loss of life and property that may occur in the future, it has become necessary to estimate the magnitude and the expansion zone of the land subsidence by carrying out geodetic monitoring studies in the region.In this study, the analyzes performed by Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar-Small Baseline Subset (InSAR-SBAS) and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) methods to monitor land subsidence in the KMRB are presented. For this purpose, monthly 74 SAR images from 2017 to the end of 2022 were evaluated according to the SBAS procedure in the GMTSAR academic analysis software. In order to, both validate the InSAR-SBAS results and convert the deformation rate in the Line of Sight (LOS) to the ellipsoid normal direction, 3 periods of GNSS campaign were performed between 2021 and 2023 in 5 different GNSS stations and evaluated with the GAMIT/GLOBK software. According to the analyses, the land subsidence rate of up to −165 mm/year has been estimated in the KMRB, especially in the district centers of Bayındır and Ödemiş. In addition, unlike many studies, different rates and propagation of subsidence were determined in different parts of the basin depending on the aquifer type and precipitation. Monthly time series of the deformations were created and the behavior of the deformations and its relationship with the groundwater withdrawal and the lithological structure in the region was scrutinized. Thus, the spatio-temporal behaviour of the land subsidence and the associated geological factors were revealed.