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Optimized Sustainable Groundwater Extraction Management: General Approach and Application to the City of Lucknow, India

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Abstract

In rapidly developing urban areas of emerging countries, increased water demand has led to enormous groundwater withdrawal, calling out for sustainable groundwater management. We suggest implementing a sustainable pumping rate concept based on numerical modeling of the managed aquifer. Sustainability is achieved by constraints regarding (1) a minimum groundwater discharge rate to gaining rivers (ecological constraint) and (2) a maximum drawdown along the city boundaries (social constraints) to prevent excessive groundwater depletion in the neighboring peri-urban and rural areas. The total groundwater extraction is maximized subject to these constraints, leading to specific extraction patterns throughout the city, depending upon the values set for the constraints. The optimization is performed by linear programming. For a given extraction rate, the two constraints can be traded off by the groundwater manager, causing different wells to be activated or deactivated. We demonstrate the applicability of the methodology by the example of the city of Lucknow, India, but it can be transferred to other cities facing conflicts of managing groundwater resources.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the financial support by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research - BMBF for giving a scholarship to the first author within the IPSWaT program (International Postgraduate Studies in Water Technologies). The authors thank Richard B. Winston (ModelMuse developer), Hannes Taubenböck (German Aerospace Center - DLR), Venkatesh Dutta (Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University), R.S. Sinha (State Water Resources Agency) and World Data Center (WDC) of Meteorology.

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  1. Center for Applied Geoscience (ZAG), University of Tübingen, Hölderlinstr. 12, 72074, Tübingen, Germany

    Ashutosh Singh, Claudius M. Bürger & Olaf A. Cirpka

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  1. Ashutosh Singh
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  2. Claudius M. Bürger
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  3. Olaf A. Cirpka
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Correspondence to Olaf A. Cirpka.

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Singh, A., Bürger, C.M. & Cirpka, O.A. Optimized Sustainable Groundwater Extraction Management: General Approach and Application to the City of Lucknow, India. Water Resour Manage 27, 4349–4368 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-013-0415-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-013-0415-z

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