Effects of groundwater lateral flow on land surface processes: a case study in Heihe River Basin, north-west of China

Abstract:

As an important component of hydrologic cycle, groundwater is affected by topography, vegetation, climate condition, and anthropogenic activity. Groundwater horizontal convergence and divergence and vertical interaction with soil water result in variations of soil moisture, water and energy exchanges between the land surface and the atmosphere, which ultimately influences climate. In this work, a two-dimensional groundwater lateral flow scheme based on groundwater mass equation, is developed and incorporated into the land surface model CLM4.5 to investigate effects of groundwater lateral flow on land surface processes in a river basin. A 30-year simulation with groundwater lateral flow and a control run without the horizontal movement are conducted over Heihe River Basin, north-west China, from 1979 to 2012 using the developed model. Results show that with groundwater lateral flow, equilibrium distribution of groundwater table shows more spatial variability following topography rather than the water balance between local precipitation and evapotranspiration, and are much closer to well observations especially over middle reaches area. Along with shallower groundwater table over piedmont areas in the middle reaches, increased soil moisture is shown which alleviates the underestimation of CLM4.5 at here. Changes in evapotranspiration are occurred and it is mainly controlled by the variation of local surface soil moisture, since water is the major limitation factor of evapotranspiration over this arid area. Besides, groundwater lateral flow can change the distribution of surface runoff by changing the saturated area fraction of each model grid cell. Energy cycle also responds to the changes of hydrological cycle which redistributes the sensible heat flux and latent heat flux in the entire basin.