Assessing controls on diffuse groundwater recharge using unsaturated flow modeling

Abstract

Understanding climate, vegetation, and soil controls on recharge is essential for estimating potential impacts of climate variability and land use/land cover change on recharge. Recharge controls were evaluated by simulating drainage in 5‐m‐thick profiles using a one‐dimensional (1‐D) unsaturated flow code (UNSAT‐H), climate data, and vegetation and soil coverages from online sources. Soil hydraulic properties were estimated from STATSGO/SSURGO soils data using pedotransfer functions. Vegetation parameters were obtained from the literature. Long‐term (1961–1990) simulations were conducted for 13 county‐scale regions representing arid to humid climates and different vegetation and soil types, using data for Texas. Areally averaged recharge rates are most appropriate for water resources; therefore Geographic Information Systems were used to determine spatial weighting of recharge results from 1‐D models for the combination of vegetation and soils in each region. Simulated 30‐year mean annual recharge in bare sand is high (51–709 mm/yr) and represents 23–60% (arid–humid) of mean annual precipitation (MAP). Adding vegetation reduced recharge by factors of 2–30 (humid–arid), and soil textural variability reduced recharge by factors of 2–11 relative to recharge in bare sand. Vegetation and soil textural variability both resulted in a large range of recharge rates within each region; however, spatially weighted, long‐term recharge rates were much less variable and were positively correlated with MAP (r 2 = 0.85 for vegetated sand; r 2 = 0.62 for variably textured soils). The most realistic simulations included vegetation and variably textured soils, which resulted in recharge rates from 0.2 to 118 mm/yr (0.1–10% of MAP). Mean annual precipitation explains 80% of the variation in recharge and can be used to map recharge.