Groundwater and surface water interaction: From theory to practice

Abstract

Groundwater Recent research has shown that development is not the only reason why it is important to understand how surface water and groundwater interact. Climate change is likely to affect the availability and distribution of both, so increasingly this interaction is playing a bigger role for water resource management. In the simplest terms, if we don’t know if, and how much water infiltrates from a river into an aquifer, we don’t know how much water to allocate from the river to a particular user. In a water-scarce country like South Africa, explains Prof Gideon Steyl, research fellow at the Institute for Groundwater Studies (IGS) at the University of the Free State, we might increasingly have to look towards groundwater as a sustainable source of water. If this is the case, knowledge of the interplay between these systems is imperative. In order to understand the mechanisms of this interaction, observational data is integral but, lacking in South Africa.

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