Understanding and modelling surface water-groundwater interactions

• Main Authors: Tanner, Jane L, Hughes, Denis A
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Water Research Commission 2015
• Subjects: To be catalogued; sami
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/438220; https://corycommons.ru.ac.za/vital/access/manager/Repository/vital:73444; https://wrcwebsite.azurewebsites.net/wp-content/uploads/mdocs/2056%20-2-14.pdf

The main objective of the total project was to contribute to the incorpo-ration of uncertainty assessments in practical water resource decision making in South Africa. The companion report addresses more general issues of uncertainty and hydrological modelling, while this report con-centrates on the uncertainties in both understanding and modelling the interactions between surface water and groundwater. Since groundwa-ter routines were added into the widely used Pitman model in the early 2000s by both Prof Hughes and Mr Karim Sami, the approaches have come under a great deal of criticism mainly from the geohydrological community of specialists within South Africa. Arguably, a great deal of this criticism is based on misunderstandings of the intention of adding groundwater routines into an existing surface water model. It was stated quite clearly at the time that this approach was not seen as a replace-ment for existing detailed numerical approaches to groundwater model-ling. The intention was to create a scientific and practical tool that could be used to simulate the complete hydrological cycle at the catchment scale so that integrated water resources decision making could be better supported.