Groundwater Management Essay

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Groundwater is the most significant source of clean water for an assortment of uses, including industrial, irrigation, drinking and domestic habits. Nevertheless, excessive usage of groundwater has resulted depletion of this natural resources and thus a continual fall in its groundwater level. A gradual decline in water quality is also taking place, from industrial, farming and domestic effluents entering into hydrologic cycle. To counteract groundwater resource depletion and deterioration, its management is a critical issue, for current and future generation. During the past three decades, many groundwater management models were developed by several researchers by linking groundwater flow/transport simulation model with optimization model (Shamir et al.,1984; Ahlfeld et al., 1986; Lefkoff and Gorelick, 1986; Willis and Finney, 1988; Finney and Samsuhadi, 1992; Emch and Yeh, 1998; Zheng and Wang, 2002,Wu and Zhu, 2006; Ayvaz,2009;Gaur et al.,2011a; Gaur et al.,2011b; Ghandour and Elsaid, 2013). The distinctive features, among those studies, are the type of the groundwater management problems, the way governing PDEs of groundwater flow or transport is solved in the simulation stage and the types of algorithms used in the optimization phase. Previous studies on groundwater management generally used numerical tools like finite difference method (FDM) or finite element method (FEM) for simulating groundwater flow and transport processes and therefore struck by various shortcomings of these methods, like choice of appropriate boundary condition, domain discretization error, numerical stability, difficulty in representing the well location accurately, and difficulty in representing stream/rivers. As an alternative, Gaur et al., (2011)...

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...and Lin, 1994) considering two management scenarios (i) maximization of total pumping (ii) minimization of total pumping cost. Results are compared with the previous results available in literature. Second, a multiobjective cat swarm optimization (MOCSO) model has been developed and coupled with AEM based simulation model. Coupled AEM-MOCSO model has been applied to the same hypothetical problem, considering two conflicting multiple objectives: maximization of total pumping and minimization of total pumping cost. Third reverse path line calculation of water particles from the well locations is done by particle tracking method (PT), using head and velocity obtained from AEM based flow simulation model. Then the model is coupled with CSO, to develop a management strategy for minimization of groundwater contamination by capture zone management (AEM-PT-CSO) of the well.

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