Adjoint Model for the Selection of Groundwater Well Locations to Minimize Stream Depletion

摘要

With growing populations and increased demand for water, it is necessary to ensure that increased pumping of aquifers does not reduce flows in rivers to levels that would limit the availability of water for drinking water supply, irrigation, and riparian habitat. Analytical solutions and numerical simulations have been used to quantify stream depletion, which is the change in stream flow due to pumping. Typically, in these approaches, the location of the pumping well is assumed to be known; thus they can be inefficient as a tool for siting new well locations. In this work, we use an adjoint-based modeling approach to quantify stream depletion due to aquifer pumping. In a single simulation of an adjoint model, stream depletion is calculated for a well at any location in the aquifer; thus, it is computationally efficient when the number of well locations or possible well locations is large.