Abstract
Groundwater withdrawal results in a significant depletion of groundwater storage due to the frequency and intensity of droughts and increasing irrigation demands. To ensure the sustainable use of groundwater resources, it is necessary to accurately simulate the groundwater behavior of catchments using a surface–groundwater integrated runoff model. Most of the existing catchment runoff models have been applied to surface water management; thus, integrated runoff analysis studies that consider the interaction between surface water and groundwater are required. Due to the intensive agricultural sector in Korea and the position of rice as the staple in the Korean diet, more than 50% of groundwater abstraction is used for irrigation. Therefore, it is very important to understand the hydrological interrelationships between agricultural areas and the entire watershed. This study aimed to compare and analyze the groundwater levels in the mountainous areas and paddy field areas in the Boryeong Dam catchment through a surface–groundwater integrated runoff simulation using the Catchment Hydrologic Cycle Assessment Tool model, and to compare the hydrological responses in wet years (2010–2012) and dry years (2014–2016). The maximum difference in the monthly groundwater level in the dry years compared to the wet years was 1.07 m at the forest catchment and 0.37 m at the paddy catchment. These results indicate that the impact of drought on the groundwater level of paddy catchments is not significant compared to the forest catchments; however, drought slows the recovery of the groundwater level before the rainy season, thereby limiting the agricultural groundwater use in the catchment.
Highlights
The results show that the available groundwater for agriculture is greatly affected by the drought season, and the efficient management of groundwater is very important, especially in groundwater-fed irrigation catchments
The impact of drought on groundwater levels over the Boryeong Dam catchment was analyzed in the present study
The results of the single watershed runoff simulation show that the rainfall excess infiltration method showed the most satisfactory model performance compared to the Horton and Green–Ampt infiltration methods, with values of 0.802 for Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) and 0.827 for Kling–Gupta efficiency (KGE) in the calibrated period, and 0.722 for NSE and 0.825 for KGE in the validated period
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).Climate change has been shown to be a principal factor changing the hydrological cycle on a global scale [1]. The drought cycle pattern in South Korea has been shortened recently, and droughts of varying intensity have occurred every year since 2013 [2]. The Boryeong
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