Integrated Management of Watersheds and Aquifers Systems under Extreme Drought Scenarios

Abstract

The chapter addresses groundwater artificial recharge solutions for integrated management of watersheds and aquifer systems under extreme drought scenarios. Based on a lecture presented by Dr. JP Lobo Ferreira at UNESCO’s International Year of Planet Earth (IYPE) Workshop held in Oslo, Norway, August 2009, the conceptual idea of Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) is considered, in this chapter, as one of the scientific based solutions towards scientific based mitigation measures to climate variability and change in many parts of the world. Towards a sounder selection of the most appropriate method to build ARS facilities, several experiments have been carried out in the Portuguese Southern region of the Algarve during the European Union sponsored 6th Framework Programme for Research GABARDINE Project on “Groundwater artificial recharge based on alternative sources of water: Advanced integrated technologies and management”. The values obtained for infiltration rates available on the multiple experimental facilities, depend not only on the hydraulic heads but also on the type of experiments and on the type of soils available regionally. The results gathered allowed the drawing of several original charts on infiltration rates that will be presented at the end of this chapter. The aim of all these experiments was to improve the knowledge on real case studies application of different AR methodologies also to assess the parameters needed to develop optimization models. The model may incorporate restrictions and parameters of the objective function that values evaluated in the experiments, described above. The results presented in this chapter allow the selection of most appropriate AR techniques aiming the maximization of groundwater quality improvement, while minimizing the cost. In parallel a new method, called GABA-IFI, aiming preliminary identification of candidate areas for the installation of groundwater artificial recharge system was developed for the European Union sponsored 6th Framework Programme for Research Coordinated Action ASEMWATERNet, a “Multi-Stakeholder Platform for ASEM S&T Cooperation on Sustainable Water Use” based on based previous studies developed for five Portuguese Watershed Plans. This new method was applied both to Campina de Faro aquifer and to Querença-Silves aquifer, in the Algarve. The chapter addresses the achievements this Project.