Abstract
AbstractAcross the UK, water abstracted from ground, surface, and tidal stores is regulated through a system of licenses to protect both the sources and the environment. Similar permits are required for discharging wastewater to rivers or onto the ground. These abstractions and discharges can have a significant impact on UK Rivers, but measurements are not readily available, which discourages their use in hydrological models of river flows. However, these very unique data sets provide a means to improve the performance of spatially distributed hydrological models, particularly during periods when abstraction regulations change and at ungauged river locations. To demonstrate this, point source abstraction and discharge measurements across England have been transformed into 1 × 1 km resolution gridded data and used with an enhanced formulation of the Grid‐to‐Grid (G2G) hydrological model where these processes are mathematically represented. A comparison of G2G‐simulated and gauged river flows for 605 catchments across England between 1999 and 2014 indicates that model simulation of river flows is generally improved at gauged locations downstream of abstraction/discharge sites. The main improvement is in the simulation of low flows, for which the median performance is improved by 10.7%, however, the impact on simulation of high river flows is more modest (1.5% improvement). These results demonstrate the potential gains available to the international hydrological and land‐surface modeling community from using records of actual water use (where available) in models, in place of more widely used national statistics.
Highlights
Over the last century, anthropogenic use of water rose dramatically (UN-Water, 2020) enabled by the development and usage of pumps to extract groundwater
The main improvement is in the simulation of low flows, for which the median performance is improved by 10.7%, the impact on simulation of high river flows is more modest (1.5% improvement)
Across the 605 study catchments, the balance between the volumes of water abstracted and discharged varies depending on the catchment as shown in Figure 4b, which highlights catchments for which mean abstraction volumes (1999–2014) are typically larger than discharges
Summary
Anthropogenic use of water rose dramatically (UN-Water, 2020) enabled by the development and usage of pumps to extract groundwater (de Graaf et al, 2019; Shah et al, 2001). Abstracted water is used for agricultural (irrigation, livestock, and aquaculture), industrial, or municipal (direct use by the population) purposes (FAO, 2016). Abstracted water can be returned to the land (e.g., by irrigation) and to rivers (e.g., through discharges from waste water, sewage treatment processes, and industry). In the 20th century, the global freshwater withdrawal for agriculture, industry, and municipal uses was estimated to have intensified by a factor of six (UN-Water, 2020) as a result of global population and economic growth, and technological advances. The Grid-to-Grid (G2G) is a national-scale hydrological model that provides estimates of river flows, runoff, and soil moisture on a 1 × 1 km grid across Great Britain (Bell et al, 2009; Moore et al, 2006). The following section describes the set of model enhancements implemented to accommodate the use of spatially distributed abstraction and discharge data
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