Decomposing groundwater head variations into meteorological and pumping components: a synthetic study

Abstract

Time-series modeling is often used to decompose groundwater hydrographs into individual drivers such as pumping and meteorological factors. To date, there has been an assumption that a simulation fitting the total hydrograph produces reliable estimates of the impact from each driver. That is, assessment of the decomposition has not used an independent estimate of each decomposition result. To begin to address this, a synthetic study is undertaken so that the impact of each driver is known. In this study, 500 MODFLOW groundwater models of a one-layer unconfined aquifer were constructed. For each model, three hydrogeological properties (saturated hydraulic conductivity, storativity and depth t..