Groundwater recharge

Water balance

Groundwater recharge or deep drainage or deep percolation is a hydrologic process, where water moves downward from surface water to groundwater. Recharge is the primary method through which water enters an aquifer. This process usually occurs in the vadose zone below plant roots and is often expressed as a flux to the water table surface. Groundwater recharge also encompasses water moving away from the water table farther into the saturated zone.[1] Recharge occurs both naturally (through the water cycle) and through anthropogenic processes (i.e., "artificial groundwater recharge"), where rainwater and/or reclaimed water is routed to the subsurface.

The most common methods to estimate recharge rates are: chloride mass balance (CMB); soil physics methods; environmental and isotopic tracers; groundwater-level fluctuation methods; water balance (WB) methods (including groundwater models (GMs)); and the estimation of baseflow (BF) to rivers.[2]

  1. ^ Freeze, R.A.; Cherry, J.A. (1979). Groundwater. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-365312-0. OCLC 643719314. Accessed from: http://hydrogeologistswithoutborders.org/wordpress/1979-english/ Archived 2020-04-06 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ MacDonald, Alan M; Lark, R Murray; Taylor, Richard G; Abiye, Tamiru; Fallas, Helen C; Favreau, Guillaume; Goni, Ibrahim B; Kebede, Seifu; Scanlon, Bridget; Sorensen, James P R; Tijani, Moshood; Upton, Kirsty A; West, Charles (2021-03-01). "Mapping groundwater recharge in Africa from ground observations and implications for water security". Environmental Research Letters. 16 (3): 034012. Bibcode:2021ERL....16c4012M. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/abd661. ISSN 1748-9326. S2CID 233941479. Text was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License