Annualmeeting:2017 CSDMS meeting-129
Browse abstracts
Vicken Hillis choose to not submit an abstract for this conference.
[[Image:|300px|right|link=File:]]In the desert, mountainous region of Southeast California, recently-developed energy plants rely on groundwater resources for their cooling needs. Different cooling methods require vastly different amounts of water. Quantifying regional water balance fluxes such as recharge and trans-valley groundwater flow is challenging due to the importance of run-on infiltration, yet it is important for estimating the impacts of the water withdrawals. Previous research employed isolated groundwater models were run independently using crude and uniform estimate of recharge. Here, we employ a surface-subsurface processes model, PAWS+CLM, to provide estimates of recharge including run-on and mountain front recharge. The properties of the desert mountains, soil and aquifers are constrained by in-situ moisture measurements, hydrostratigraphic surveys, and well logs data. The recharge concentrates along alluvial fans at the mountain edges and at end-of-wash depressions that holds water running down from washes. As a result, the spatial distribution of recharge is very different from a uniform, diffuse recharge commonly assumed by practitioners. Using concentrated recharge, the pumping by solar plants lead to much steeper drawdown than that simulated using commonly assumed diffuse recharge. The land surface model provides a valuable solution to estimating water balance for this data-scarce region.
