Groundwater model project

Project summary
In order to represent groundwater-surface water interactions as well as the impact of capillary rise on evapotranspiration in global-scale hydrological models, it is necessary to simulate the location and temporal variation of the groundwater table. This requires replacing simulation of groundwater dynamics using groundwater storage variations in individual grid cells (independent from the storage variation in neighbouring cells) with hydraulic head gradient-based groundwater modelling.
G³M is a newly developed gradient-based groundwater model which adapts MODFLOW principles for the global-scale. It is written in C++ and intended to be coupled to the global hydraulic model WaterGAP, but can also be used for regional groundwater models and coupling to other hydraulic models. The software is tailored to maximize performance and extensibility, and eventually will be released as an Open Source project.

Our contribution
  1. Building the model framework
  2. Building the model
  3. An extensive Sensitivity Analysis of model inputs
  4. Comparison to other large-scale groundwater models
  5. Comparison to world-wide observations
  6. Model-Coupling to the global hydrological model WaterGAP
  7. Assessment of human impact on groundwater levels on the global-scale
  8. Assessment of climate change impact on groundwater levels on the global-scale


Contact
Robert Reinecke

Duration
November 2014 – April 2019

Funding
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Promotionsstipendium

Publications
Forthcoming

Posters
Robert Reinecke et al., “Building a Global Groundwater Model from Scratch”, AGU 2016

Presentations
Robert Reinecke et al., “Global-scale gradient-based groundwater modeling within the global hydrological model WaterGAP: Implementation challenges and first results”, IGEM 2016
Robert Reinecke et al., “Building a Global Groundwater Model – Case Study: Comparison to the Central Valley Hydrologic Model”, Modflow and more 2017

Further information
globalgroundwatermodel.org