Prediction of water table depths under soil water-groundwater interaction and stream water conveyance

Abstract

Water table over an arid region can be elevated to a critical level to sustain terrestrial ecosystem along the natural channel by the stream water conveyance. Estimation of water table depth and soil moisture on river channel profile may be reduced to a two-dimensional moving boundary problem with soil water-groundwater interaction. The two-dimensional soil water flow with stream water transferred is divided into an unsaturated vertical soil water flow and a horizontal groundwater flow. Therefore, a prediction model scheme for water table depths under the interaction between soil water and groundwater with stream water transferred is presented, which includes a vertical soil water movement model, a horizontal groundwater movement model, and an interface model. The synthetic experiments are conducted to test the sensitivities of the river elevation, horizontal conductivity, and surface flux, and the results from the experiments show the robustness of the proposed scheme under different conditions. The groundwater horizontal conductivity of the proposed scheme is also calibrated by SCE-UA method and validated by data collected at the Yingsu section in the lower reaches of the Tarim River, which shows that the model can reasonably simulate the water table depths.