Evaluation of groundwater changes in an arid shallow aquifer using groundwater level, electrical conductivity and temperature time series analysis

Common causes for groundwater quantity and quality changes are infiltration through the seasonal floodwater, effects of the artificial recharge projects and adjacent aquifers, and groundwater extraction for deferent uses. However, recognizing the impact of their contributions to these changes can be often challenging. Still, to understand the changes, monitoring groundwater level and several chemical factors are taken into consideration. Certain problems of course can complicate the analysis of the observations; for instance, insufficient data and manually prepared and measurement intervals can degrade the accuracy of such observations. In this paper, device-measured daily time series of Electrical Conductivity (EC), Temperature (T) and Groundwater Head (GH) are analyzed. The main purpose is to evaluate the groundwater changes and its relation to the processes on the aquifer surface in an arid region. Two wells (PZ2 and W20) with 1,200m distance from each other selected and installed a sensitive device for recording the groundwater level, temperature and salinity fluctuations. Time series of changes from December 2012 to July 2013, were analyzed. Groundwater head in PZ2 showed a decline but in W20 showed a minor rise. Salinity variations were different and were 15.3mS/cm in PZ2 and 1.7mS/cm in W20. The backdrop of increased salinity in the surface layers of groundwater in PZ2 identified and showing a correlation between groundwater head and salinity fluctuation with 83.5% R squire.