Identifying hotspots of water table depth change by coupling trend with time stability analysis in the North China Plain

Xia Liu; Leilei Min; Yuru Chang; Yanjun Shen; Zhuoran Wang; Yan-Jun Shen

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.167002

Identifying hotspots of water table depth change by coupling trend with time stability analysis in the North China Plain

Sci Total Environ. 2023 Dec 15:904:167002. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.167002. Epub 2023 Sep 11.

Authors

Xia Liu¹, Leilei Min¹, Yuru Chang¹, Yanjun Shen¹, Zhuoran Wang², Yan-Jun Shen³

Affiliations

¹ CAS-Key Laboratory of Agricultural Water Resources, Hebei-Key Laboratory of Water Saving Agriculture, Center for Agricultural Resources Research, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shijiazhuang 050022, China.
² Information Center (Hydrological Monitor and Forecast Center), Ministry of Water Resources, Beijing 100053, China.
³ CAS-Key Laboratory of Agricultural Water Resources, Hebei-Key Laboratory of Water Saving Agriculture, Center for Agricultural Resources Research, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shijiazhuang 050022, China. Electronic address: shenyanjun@sjziam.ac.cn.

PMID: 37704135
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.167002

Abstract

Many groundwater construction projects such as South-to-North Water Diversion Project (SNWDP) were conducted for controlling groundwater overexploitation in the North China Plain (NCP). However, more insight is required into the magnitude and distribution of water table depth (WTD) in time and space over the NCP. This study evaluated the variability and the hotspots of WTD based on 83 unconfined monitoring wells and took trend, breakpoint, and time stability into consideration. We found the average WTD of unconfined aquifer for the Southern Hebei Plain generally increased continuously from 1998 to 2020 in spite of the operation of the SNWDP since 2014. However, the rise rate of WTD slows down in recent years and the WTD has decreased in certain subregions. We further divided these groundwater wells into five groups: climb accelerating (Group 1), increase decelerating (Group 2), first rise then descend (Group 3), first descend then rise (Group 4), decrease decelerating (Group 5), and reduce accelerating (Group 6). Moreover, we found that the number of wells that divided into Group1 to Group 5 account for 15 %, 41 %, 25 %, 18 %, and 1 % of the total number of observation wells. The breakpoints of all the wells are from 2001 to 2017 and most of the breakpoints were found before 2014, which demonstrates that other groundwater management strategies implemented in the Southern Hebei Plain prior to the operation of the SNWDP plays a crucial part. The hotspots area for group 1 is mainly distributed in the north region of Shijiazhuang City, group 2 is in southern region of piedmont plain, group 3 is in northern region of Baoding and south-west region of Xingtai City, and group 4 is in Cangzhou City and eastern region of Xingtai City. The method and framework of this study can be applied in other regions suffering from groundwater depletion.

Keywords: Groundwater depletion; Hotspots; North China Plain; South-to-North Water Diversion Project; Southern Hebei Plain; Time stability analysis.