Building a Global Groundwater Model fromScratch - Concepts and Results

To represent groundwater-surface water interactions as well as the impact of capillary rise on evapotranspiration in global-scale hydrological models, it is necessary to simulate the location and temporal variation of the groundwater table. This requires to replace simulation of groundwater dynamics by calculating groundwater storage variations in individual grid cells (independent from the storage variation in neighboring cells) by hydraulic head gradient-based groundwater modeling. Based on the experience of two research groups who have published different approaches for global-scale groundwater modeling, we present first results of our effort to develop a transient global groundwater model that is to replace the simple storage-based ground-water module of the global hydrological model WaterGAP. The following three technical and conceptual aspects of this endeavour arediscussed: (1) A software engineering approach to build a new hydraulic head based global groundwater model from scratch with the goal of maximizing performance and extensibility. (2) Comparison to other model approaches and their inherent problems. (3) Global-data deficits and how to deal with them. Furthermore, this poster presents and discusses first results and provides an outlook on future developments.