Abstracts - Posters
Climate Trends and their Relationship with Groundwater Level Variation in the Upper Carbonate Aquifer, Southern Manitoba
Zhuoheng Chen1, Stephen E. Grasby and Kirk G. Osadetz
1Natural Resources Canada
zchen@nrcan.gc.ca
Groundwater is an important water supply on the Canadian prairies. The trends of increasing annual air temperature and decreasing precipitation in the prairies raise concerns about the sustainable supply of groundwater. Assessing the impacts of future climate change on groundwater supply is essential to an adaptation strategy. As a deterministic approach requires detailed information on hydraulic properties and recharge rates, which are typically difficult to obtain, we have developed a statistical method for examining the impact of climate change on groundwater response, which relies on readily available groundwater monitoring records and key climatic observations, and allows a more rapid and less expensive assessment of aquifers with limited data under given climate change scenarios. Our study on climate trends, and their impact on groundwater resources, found that precipitation has the strongest correlation with groundwater level variability. However, a sensitivity study showed that in two different periods, with a mean temperature difference of 1.5 °C, the correlation between temperature and groundwater level has increased 15% in the warmer period as compared to the cooler period. Whereas the correlation with precipitation does not display a significant increase (only 5%). This finding provides convincing evidence that increasing temperature alone could have a significant impact on groundwater level.
2005-04-06 |
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