{"id":1151,"date":"2022-03-22T08:10:44","date_gmt":"2022-03-22T07:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cimafoundation.org\/2022\/03\/22\/studying-groundwater-to-analyze-water-balance-and-modeling-capabilities-during-droughts\/"},"modified":"2022-03-22T08:11:02","modified_gmt":"2022-03-22T08:11:02","slug":"studying-groundwater-to-analyze-water-balance-and-modeling-capabilities-during-droughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/news\/studying-groundwater-to-analyze-water-balance-and-modeling-capabilities-during-droughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Studying groundwater to analyze water balance and modeling capabilities during droughts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This year, the World Water Day, celebrated on March 22, is dedicated to groundwater, fundamental for the life of ecosystems and for human well-being and activities. However, studying them is not easy: we asked Giulia Bruno, PhD student at the University of Genoa at CIMA Research Foundation, to tell us how they are investigated and why it is important to take them into account in hydrological modeling<\/em> <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Groundwater is invisible, but its impact is visible everywhere.<\/em> 
Out of sight, under our feet, groundwater is a hidden treasure that enriches our lives.\u202f<\/em> 
Almost all of the liquid freshwater in the world is groundwater.<\/em> 
As climate change gets worse, groundwater will become more and more critical.\u202f<\/em> 
We need to work together to sustainably manage this precious resource.<\/em> 
Groundwater may be out of sight, but it must not be out of mind.\u202f<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the opening of the website<\/a> dedicated to the World Water Day, established by the United Nations and this year, as you can easily understand from the few lines above, it is dedicated to a special form of water available on our planet: groundwater. According to the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre<\/a> (IGRAD), globally about half of the water we drink comes from underground; groundwater also represents 40% of the water used for agriculture and one third of the water needed for industrial purposes. In addition, groundwater plays a vital role in the well-being of ecosystems, rivers and soil, preventing subsidence. Human exploitation and the effects of climate change, however, represent a risk to this resource – and, consequently, to our own species. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

CIMA Research Foundation has been dealing with “water” since its inception: flood forecasting and monitoring, hydrological cycle study, research on meteorology and the effect of precipitation on the ground, analysis of water resources in the form of ice and snow, and investigations on the phenomenon of drought – all these are areas that involve this resource in its various forms. Historically, however, we have not focused specifically on groundwater. This field of study has been pursued only in more recent times thanks to the work of Giulia Bruno, a PhD student at the University of Genoa who is conducting her research at CIMA Research Foundation and is currently guest scientist at the IGB-Leibniz Institute of Freshwater and Inland Fisheries<\/a> in Berlin: we therefore asked her to tell us about her work, in order to better understand the link between drought, groundwater and modeling research. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hidden reserve <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

“When investigating droughts, the two components on which it is easier to collect data and on which we usually focus are precipitation and river flow rate the two components on which we usually focus – also because of the greater availability of data – are precipitation and river flow rate,” she explains. In the evaluation of the water balance, in fact, the contribution of groundwater tends to be neglected because it is the component of the hydrological cycle that, together with evapotranspiration, i.e. the water used by plants, remains more difficult to measure. If to measure rainfall and river flow we can in fact easily make use of, for example, on-site monitoring stations, which collect data on the amount of water present, the same cannot be said for evapotranspiration and for water from the so-called subsurface storage, i.e., the first layers of the Earth’s regolith, those that include the soil and the aquifers and therefore also include groundwater.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“For the latter, in particular, point estimates can be had through sensors and measuring points, but these are not so distributed over the territory as to be suitable for large-scale analysis. Today, therefore, research increasingly relies on remote sensing and in particular satellite products that, through measurements of the variation in the Earth’s gravitational field, make it possible to estimate changes in terrestrial water storage from which it is also possible to derive groundwater variation.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monitoring and forecasting <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

“The aim of my research is therefore precisely to study the response of the water balance to dry periods by working on all its components and in particular on the two most “neglected”, evapotranspiration and changes in the amount of water in the subsurface storage,” explains Bruno. The latter, moreover, is particularly important because the water contained in the subsoil has a fundamental role in regulating the processes that drive the propagation of the precipitation deficit, i.e. the “meteorological” drought. In other words, it is groundwater and, more generally, water in the subsurface reservoir that influences, for example, the availability of water for plants and represents a supply for human activities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“At the beginning, the work focused mainly on the analysis of data collected with the different tools we have at our disposal; after this first phase, I am now addressing the issue from the modeling point of view, evaluating the ability of the hydrological model Continuum, developed by CIMA Foundation, to reproduce in different configurations the main variables associated with drought: river flow, evapotranspiration and variations in the subsurface storage,” continues the PhD student.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“This second part of the work is useful to understand how the hydrological processes are represented by the models, so that they can be used for both monitoring and forecasting purposes, even in dry periods. In this phase we also compare the data observed by satellite products with those predicted by hydrological models such as Continuum, a comparison that allows us to better understand the behavior of the model itself and then develop strategies to improve the estimates,” concludes Bruno. “Both in a monitoring and in a forecasting context, the role of models is particularly important if we consider that, according to the projections of experts, drought phenomena will become more frequent and intense in some areas<\/a> (such as the Mediterranean) due to climate change; this may determine, therefore, also an intensified exploitation of groundwater.”  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year, the World Water Day, celebrated on March 22, is dedicated to groundwater, fundamental for the life of ecosystems and for human well-being and activities. However, studying them is not easy: we asked Giulia Bruno, PhD student at the University of Genoa at CIMA Research Foundation, to tell us how they are investigated and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1150,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,124],"tags":[82],"class_list":["post-1151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-hydrology-and-hydraulics","tag-water"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cimafoundation.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}