Augmenting a Large-Scale Hydrology Model to Reproduce Groundwater Variability

To understand the influence of groundwater on terrestrial ecosystems and society, global assessment of groundwater temporal fluctuations is required. A water table was initialized in the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrologic model in a semi-realistic approach to account for groundwater variability. Global water table depth data derived from observations at nearly 2 million well sites compiled from government archives and published literature, as well as groundwater model simulations, were used to create a new soil layer of varying depth for each model grid cell. The new 4-layer version of VIC, hereafter named VIC-4L, was run with and without assimilating NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) observations. The results were compared with simulations using the original VIC version (named VIC-3L) with GRACE assimilation, while all runs were compared with well data.