Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on Groundwater Recharge for Different Soil Types-Guelph Region in Grand River Basin, Canada

Global warming and climate change are widely indicated as important phenomena in the 21st century that cause serious impacts on the global water resources. Changes in temperature, precipitation and evaporation are occurring in regions throughout the world, resulting in changes including, runoff, streamflow and groundwater regimes, reduced water quantity and quality.
Relying upon thirty years of base data (1965–1994), three global circulation models (GCM), namely GISS, GFDM and CCC, are utilized to assess impact of climate change to groundwater recharge rates between years 2010 to 2050 for the Guelph region of the Grand River Basin in Canada. The resulting groundwater recharge rates for alternative soil layers are used to assess water balance conditions, and ultimately, the percolation rate to the groundwater using the Visual-HELP model.
While the climate change impact assessment indicates that evaporation will increase and percolation will decrease during summer, increased percolation is indicated in winter due to additional freeze/thaw dimensions of climate change. The net effect is that the impact of climate change, based upon use of GCM models, is expected to increase groundwater recharge rate by 10% on average (7% for CCC, 10.6% for GISS and 12% for GFDM) in future.

Discussion and According to the results of this research in the Guelph region, the monthly average percolation rate is higher with climate change; (i) the percolation rate is increased during winter due to freeze/thaw effects, while (ii) it is decreased during summer due to higher evaporation rate.