Integrated Surface Water/Groundwater Modeling in the Northern Midwest

Abstract:

Surface water and groundwater models have typically been developed separately, and additional approaches for building coupled models at regional scales are needed to assess the effects of climate variability and change, land use change, biogeochemical, and anthropogenic scenarios on water quantity and quality in areas like the Midwest that depend heavily on both surface and groundwater resources. Our current research is focused on the development of a coupled surface water / groundwater hydrology model which integrates groundwater recharge simulated by the macro-scale Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrologic model into the GFLOW analytic element groundwater model. The spatially explicit hydrologic model is applied to a lake-rich region in northern Wisconsin and Michigan in order to quantify the groundwater and surface water inputs to the many lakes that are present. Integrated model results quantify highly variable hydrologic contributions to lakes for surface water and groundwater. The simplicity of this approach is intended to facilitate application of the model to relatively large spatial scales, such as the entire Midwest, in future work.