Simulation of national-scale groundwater dynamics in geologically complex aquifer systems: an example from Great Britain

ABSTRACT

The national-scale British Groundwater Model (BGWM) is implemented to simulate groundwater dynamics and budgets in Great Britain. Notwithstanding the challenges of integrating a very large amount of data, finding a trade-off between computational efficiency and realism, performing automatic calibration, and addressing multiple sources of structural and parameter uncertainty, a quantitative–qualitive evaluation approach showed that the BGWM provides a reasonably accurate digital representation of groundwater systems and processes at a national scale. In this work, the model was applied to understand the variability of budget components across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Comparisons showed regional differences linked to lithological and climatic factors, which in turn can be associated with more or less groundwater resilience to extreme climatic events. There is confidence that the current and future versions of the BGWM can become valuable tools for effective water resources management and adaptation strategies under future climatic and population changes.

KEYWORDS:

• groundwater modelling
• water budgets
• British aquifers

Editor A. Fiori; Associate Editor (not assigned)

Editor A. Fiori; Associate Editor (not assigned)

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank the editor, Giacomo Medici, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments and suggestions, which improved the quality of the manuscript. This work was funded through the Hydro-JULES research programme of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) (NE/S017380/1). All the BGS authors publish with the permission of the Executive Director of the British Geological Survey (NERC).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2024.2320847

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council [NE/S017380/1].