RIEL News
Study finds groundwater is warming due to climate change
Groundwater is considered critical for life on Earth. However, relatively little is known about how groundwater responds to rising temperatures on the surface. A new assessment has shed light on this vast underground resource.
Around the globe, groundwater plays important roles in catchments by providing baseflow to rivers and sustaining groundwater-dependent vegetation, among other things. Like surface waters, groundwater is projected to be impacted by climate change-driven modifications to the hydrological cycle.
RIEL’s Dr Dylan Irvine was part of a team that produced the first projections of groundwater temperature change due to atmospheric warming in the paper ‘Global groundwater warming due to climate change’, published in Nature Geoscience in 2024. The paper first develops a model of current groundwater temperatures, then produces projections, driven by global climate models.
Groundwater temperature can influence water quality through enhanced leaching or microbial activity. Groundwater discharge also maintains thermal refugia in rivers and streams. Increased groundwater discharge temperature can impact temperature sensitive groundwater-dependent ecosystems. Understanding potential changes in future groundwater temperature can help to inform investigations to assist water resources and ecosystem management.
The study shows that relative to the year 2000, the 2100 average water table temperature is projected to warm by between 2.1 °C and 3.5 °C, depending on the climate scenario.
The projected groundwater temperatures from the study are transferrable to future research via a Google Earth Engine App that can extract projected groundwater temperatures. This makes the findings immensely useful for the research community.
This story was originally published in the RIEL Annual Report 2024
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