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Relative contribution of monsoon precipitation and pumping to changes in groundwater storage in India

Nature Geoscience volume 10, pages 109–117 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

The depletion of groundwater resources threatens food and water security in India. However, the relative influence of groundwater pumping and climate variability on groundwater availability and storage remains unclear. Here we show from analyses of satellite and local well data spanning the past decade that long-term changes in monsoon precipitation are driving groundwater storage variability in most parts of India either directly by changing recharge or indirectly by changing abstraction. We find that groundwater storage has declined in northern India at the rate of 2 cm yr−1 and increased by 1 to 2 cm yr−1 in southern India between 2002 and 2013. We find that a large fraction of the total variability in groundwater storage in north-central and southern India can be explained by changes in precipitation. Groundwater storage variability in northwestern India can be explained predominantly by variability in abstraction for irrigation, which is in turn influenced by changes in precipitation. Declining precipitation in northern India is linked to Indian Ocean warming, suggesting a previously unrecognized teleconnection between ocean temperatures and groundwater storage.

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Figure 1: Changes in groundwater storage from observation well and GRACE data during 2002–2013.
Figure 2: Changes in groundwater level in observation wells during 1996–2013 and their linkage with precipitation.
Figure 3: Changes in precipitation in irrigated and non-irrigated areas.
Figure 4: Groundwater recharge from water-level observations and the PCR-GLOBWB model for 1996–2010.
Figure 5: Linkage between groundwater storage variability and Indian Ocean SST.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge funding from the ITRA-Water project. Data availability from the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), and India Meteorological Department (IMD) is greatly appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Gandhinagar-382355, India

    Akarsh Asoka & Vimal Mishra

  2. Department of Civil Engineering and School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia V8P 5C2, Canada

    Tom Gleeson

  3. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York 10025, USA

    Yoshihide Wada

  4. Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA

    Yoshihide Wada

  5. Department of Physical Geography, Utrecht University, Domplein 29, 3512 JE, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Yoshihide Wada

  6. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Schlossplatz 1 - A-2361, Laxenburg, Austria

    Yoshihide Wada

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Contributions

V.M. conceived the idea. A.A. collected, analysed the data and developed the methodology. T.G. and Y.W. contributed to discussions of the findings. Y.W. provided groundwater recharge and abstraction data from the PCR-GLOBWB model. V.M. and A.A. wrote the manuscript with contributions from T.G. and Y.W.

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Correspondence to Vimal Mishra.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Asoka, A., Gleeson, T., Wada, Y. et al. Relative contribution of monsoon precipitation and pumping to changes in groundwater storage in India. Nature Geosci 10, 109–117 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2869

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