2025 CSDMS meeting-056
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Global change in groundwater and lake storage over the past 21,000 years
Kerry Callaghan,
University of Illinois Chicago Chicago Illinois, United States. kerryc@uic.edu
Andrew Wickert, University of Minnesota Minneapolis Minnesota, United States. awickert@umn.edu
Although groundwater and lakes are vital freshwater reservoirs, little is known about how their storage volumes change in the long term. Here, we present a transient simulation of the global water table over the past 21,000 years, including both groundwater and lake surfaces. We obtain this using the Water Table Model (WTM), which solves the 2D horizontal groundwater equation and uses Fill-Spill-Merge to route surface water into lake depressions. The model is forced using Trace-21K climate-simulation outputs, the ICE-6G ice-sheet reconstruction, and time-variable topography as a result of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA). Our results highlight the impact of well-known climatic intervals – such as the Younger Dryas and the Bølling–Allerød – on the global water table, and indicate that changes in groundwater and lake storage can modify global sea level by several decimeters at a millennial time scale.
