Sustainable development of groundwater resources in urban areas

Determining the sustainable yield of groundwater resources is a key issue for sustainable groundwater development. However, urbanization has made the hydrological process more complex in a city, thus resulting in more difficulties to estimate sustainable yield. A water budget equation in an urban context is developed in this thesis, taking into consideration man-made sources of groundwater recharge, such as the leakage from water mains and sewage pipelines, seepage through sewer systems such as septic tanks and cesspools, and artificial recharge. Besides the change in natural recharge and discharge, the change in groundwater fluxes is also incorporated into this equation. The water budget equation is applied to the urban Beijing and the sustainable yield of the groundwater system is determined. There are uncertainties in this analysis, therefore, Monte Carlo simulation is used to analyze the probability distribution of the result and provides a likely range of sustainable yield.