Water Recycling via Aquifers for Sustainable Urban Water Quality Management: Current Status, Challenges and Opportunities
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Abstract:
Managed aquifer recharge (MAR) is used worldwide in urban environments to replenish groundwater to provide a secure and sustainable supply of potable and non-potable water. It relies on natural treatment processes within aquifers (i.e., filtration, sorption, and degradation), and in some cases involves infiltration through the unsaturated zone to polish the given source water, e.g., treated wastewater, stormwater, or rainwater, to the desired quality prior to reuse. Whilst MAR in its early forms has occurred for millennia, large-scale schemes to replenish groundwater with advanced treated reclaimed water have come to the fore in cities such as Perth, Western Australia, Monterey, California, and Changwon, South Korea, as water managers consider provision for projected population growth in a drying climate. An additional bonus for implementing MAR in coastal aquifers is assisting in the prevention of seawater intrusion. This review begins with the rationale for large-scale MAR schemes in an Australian urban context, reflecting on the current status; describes the unique benefits of several common MAR types; and provides examples from around the world. It then explores several scientific challenges, ranging from quantifying aquifer removal for various groundwater contaminants to assessing risks to human health and the environment, and avoiding adverse outcomes from biogeochemical changes induced by aquifer storage. Scientific developments in the areas of water quality assessments, which include molecular detection methods for microbial pathogens and high resolution analytical chemistry methods for detecting trace chemicals, give unprecedented insight into the “polishing” offered by natural treatment. This provides opportunities for setting of compliance targets for mitigating risks to human health and maintaining high performance MAR schemes.Keywords:
Rainwater Harvesting
Sustainable yield
Abstract Theoretical principles of sustainable aquifer management are laid out in this work. The premise of our treatment is that groundwater is a renewable, although exhaustible, natural resource. The theory of this work is aimed at aquifers with a relatively homogeneous recharge that can be approximated by a logistic growth function. Sustainable aquifer exploitation occurs when the rate of ground-water extraction is equal to or less than the natural rate of groundwater replenishment for any level of aquifer storage. There can be many levels of sustainable aquifer exploitation depending on the level of aquifer storage, but there may be only one that maximizes economic returns under a variety of economic and aquifer conditions. Different strategies for sustainable exploitation are derived depending on whether or not the analysis considers tradeoffs among: (i) current and future exploitation; (ii) constant and dynamic aquifer storage conditions; and (iii) regulated and unregulated aquifer exploitation. Key factors affecting sustainable exploitation strategies include: (1) the market price of groundwater; (2) the cost of groundwater extraction; (3) the aquifer storage and natural replenishment characteristics; (4) institutional and environmental regulations on groundwater extraction; and (5) the real discount rate. An example of sustainable groundwater exploitation in Santa Barbara, California, illustrates the methods of this article.
Sustainable Management
Sustainable yield
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Abstract Specific yield (Sy) is one of the most important aquifer parameters in groundwater models with large storage changes. However, it has received limited attention from the modeling community and there are few, if any, approaches that can be widely applied for determination of Sy at the scale required for regional aquifer studies. Despite the limitations of parameter estimation methods and of direct measurements of aquifer storage properties in the field, the large uncertainty in model Sy values is typically ignored and Sy is incorrectly assumed to be a known quantity. These practices can introduce errors into model predictions of aquifer budget components, such as recharge and storage depletion. In turn, aquifer management and planning can be greatly impacted, as estimates of aquifer responses to pumping changes are highly dependent on those simulated budget components. In this work, we use a groundwater model of a portion of the High Plains aquifer in the central United States to illustrate the impacts of inappropriately large Sy values on model predictions and the related water management ramifications. Building on our recent work, we propose a data‐driven approach for determining specific yield for regional groundwater models. Results demonstrate that this new approach can improve model reliability and lead to more robust predictions of aquifer responses to management scenarios.
Groundwater model
Aquifer test
Aquifer properties
Specific storage
Sustainable yield
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Cone of depression
Aquifer test
Specific storage
Sustainable yield
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Specific storage
Sustainable yield
Aquifer test
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Citations (17)