Regional Simulation of a Groundwater Flow in Coastal Aquifer, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

Increasing demand for groundwater due to ever increasing population has initiated the need for effective management of available groundwater resources. During the past two decades, the water level in several parts of India has been falling rapidly due to increase in pumping of ground waters. Proper management of aquifer systems is necessary as groundwater is the major source for domestic and industrial purposes, especially in urban and semi urban areas. Groundwater modelling is a powerful management tool which can serve multiple purposes such as providing a framework for organising hydrologic data, quantifying the properties and behaviour of the systems and allowing quantitative prediction of the responses of those systems to externally applied stresses. A number of groundwater modelling studies have been carried out around the world for effective groundwater management (Corbet and Bethke, 1992; Storm and Mallory, 1995; Gnanasundar and Elango, 2000; Senthil Kumar and Elango, 2004). Such a study was carried out in the coastal aquifer located south of the city of Chennai, India. In addition to this, local residents also pump water from this aquifer. This aquifer is under stress due to pumping of groundwater to meet the ever increasing water needs of the city. The present study was carried out with the objective of developing a numerical model for this area in order to understand the behaviour of the system with the changes in hydrological stresses. The finite difference computer code MODFLOW (Modular 3-d finite difference flow) with Groundwater Modelling System (GMS) as pre- and post-processor was used to simulate the groundwater flow in this study.