Abstract
Mountain springs represent one of the largest and most precious sources of potable water in Italy, necessary to meet the water needs of the population. Optimizing the present and future management strategies of mountain groundwater resources has become increasingly necessary. The accuracy and frequency of the flow rate (Q) measurements determine and restrict the processes that can be studied using spring hydrograph and recession curve analysis. Therefore, to properly define mountain aquifers’ hydrogeological properties, it turns out important to highlight the variation of the error in the estimation of the hydrogeological parameters as the time interval of sampling varies. In this paper, recession curve analysis was performed on two different mountain springs (Spring 1 and Spring 2) of north-western Italy, firstly considering available 4-h resolution measuring data and subsequently by resampling data to simulate longer sampling intervals of 1, 3, 7, 15, and 30 days.The resulting distribution of errors introduced by longer acquisition intervals underlined how the percentage error increases with increasing acquisition interval. For obtaining an adequate estimation of mountain aquifer hydrodynamic parameters, in place of continuous hourly data, 1-day and 3-day sampling intervals with associated errors respectively lower than 5% and 10% were found to be valid.
Highlights
Global water demand has been increasing worldwide by about 1% per year since the 1980s, driven by a combination of population growth, socio-economic development, changing consumption patterns and it will continue to grow significantly over the foreseeable future
For each case study (Spring 1 and Spring 2), complete recession curves were generated using Q-values recorded with an acquisition interval of 4 hours (Figs. 6 and 7)
The W0 values obtained for Spring 2 by applying the two selected different methods appear comparable (117,070 m3 Boussinesq method and 117,767 m3 Maillet method), while the values provided for Wd turn to be divergent (84,071 m3 Boussinesq method and 108,410 m3 Maillet method)
Summary
Global water demand has been increasing worldwide by about 1% per year since the 1980s, driven by a combination of population growth, socio-economic development, changing consumption patterns and it will continue to grow significantly over the foreseeable future. Different hydrological issues, including the gradual drying up of many springs, low discharge rates during dry months and formerly perennial springs that have become seasonal, have been reported by authors across the Italian Alps and mountain Apennines areas. These trends have been found to be linked both to the overexploitation of groundwater resources and to climate change (Cambi and Dragoni 2000; Fiorillo et al 2007; Gattinoni and Francani 2010).
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