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Groundwater recharge is sensitive to changing long-term aridity

Nature Climate Change volume 14, pages 357–363 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Sustainable groundwater use relies on adequate rates of groundwater recharge, which are expected to change with climate change. However, climate impacts on recharge remain uncertain due to a paucity of measurements of recharge trends globally. Here we leverage the relationship between climatic aridity and long-term recharge measurements at 5,237 locations globally to identify regions where recharge is most sensitive to changes in climatic aridity. Recharge is most sensitive to climate changes in regions where potential evapotranspiration slightly exceeds precipitation, meaning even modest aridification can substantially decrease groundwater recharge. Future climate-induced recharge changes are expected to be dominated by precipitation changes, whereby changes in groundwater recharge will be amplified relative to precipitation changes. Recharge is more sensitive to changes in aridity than global hydrological models suggest. Consequently, the effects of climatic changes on groundwater replenishment and their impacts on the sustainability of groundwater use by humans and ecosystems probably exceed previous predictions.

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Fig. 1: Groundwater recharge and climatic aridity.
Fig. 2: Comparison of predicted versus observed recharge and recharge sensitivity for several global recharge predictions.
Fig. 3: Global pattern of the climate sensitivity of groundwater recharge.
Fig. 4: Impacts of projected climate changes on groundwater recharge.

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Data availability

Data used in this study are available via the cited sources. Precipitation data are available at https://www.worldclim.org/data/v1.4/worldclim14.html. Potential evapotranspiration and aridity data are available at https://cgiarcsi.community/data/global-aridity-and-petdatabase/. Recharge data are available at https://opendata.eawag.ch/dataset/globalscale_groundwater_moeck.

Climate projections are provided at https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10605454 (ref. 44).

Code availability

The code to reproduce the results of this study is available at https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10605454 (ref. 44).

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Acknowledgements

The contributions of F.J. were funded by the Swedish National Space Agency (180/18), Projects 2022-02148 and 2022-01570 of the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS), and Project 2021-05774 of the Swedish Research Council (VR).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Free University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Wouter R. Berghuijs & Ype van der Velde

  2. Department Water Resources and Drinking Water, Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland

    Raoul A. Collenteur & Christian Moeck

  3. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Scott Jasechko

  4. Department of Physical Geography/Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Fernando Jaramillo

  5. Department of Earth Science, University of Bergen, Allégaten, Bergen, Norway

    Elco Luijendijk

  6. Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, University of Nevada Reno, Reno, NV, USA

    Scott T. Allen

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Contributions

W.R.B. conceived the idea and analysed the data. W.R.B., R.A.C., S.T.A., S.J., Y.v.d.V., F.J., E.L. and C.M. co-designed the study, discussed results and contributed to writing the paper.

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Correspondence to Wouter R. Berghuijs.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Nick Cartwright, Alan MacDonald and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Nonlinearity of recharge.

A comparison of recharge non-linearity for a linear or non-linear bucket model with varying climatic aridity indicates that non-linearity may need to be included in the model to lead to more realistic recharge dynamics (see Methods). Recharge is normalized by its maximum recharge ratio for that b-value to highlight the general non-linearity in the recharge climatic aridity relationship.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Impacts of projected climate changes on groundwater recharge for SSP5–8.5.

Projected relative recharge changes (2050–2080 versus 1980–2010) (%) induced by changes in precipitation (a), potential evaporation (b), and climatic aridity (c). Results depicted here are for SSP5–8.5 and show broadly similar spatial patterns to those presented in the main text Fig. 4.

Extended Data Table 1 CMIP6 models used in the study
Full size table

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Berghuijs, W.R., Collenteur, R.A., Jasechko, S. et al. Groundwater recharge is sensitive to changing long-term aridity. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 357–363 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01953-z

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