Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
18
Regional Simulation of a
Groundwater Flow in Coastal
Aquifer, Tamil Nadu, India
L. Elango and C. Sivakumar
Department of Geology, Anna University
Chennai, India
INTRODUCTION
Increasing demand for groundwater due to ever increasing population has
initiated the need for effective management of available groundwater
resources. During the past two decades, the water level in several parts of
India has been falling rapidly due to increase in pumping of ground waters.
Proper management of aquifer systems is necessary as groundwater is the
major source for domestic and industrial purposes, especially in urban and
semi urban areas. Groundwater modelling is a powerful management tool
which can serve multiple purposes such as providing a framework for
organising hydrologic data, quantifying the properties and behaviour of the
systems and allowing quantitative prediction of the responses of those systems
to externally applied stresses. A number of groundwater modelling studies
have been carried out around the world for effective groundwater management
(Corbet and Bethke, 1992; Storm and Mallory, 1995; Gnanasundar and Elango,
2000; Senthil Kumar and Elango, 2004). Such a study was carried out in the
coastal aquifer located south of the city of Chennai, India. In addition to this,
local residents also pump water from this aquifer. This aquifer is under stress
due to pumping of groundwater to meet the ever increasing water needs of
the city. The present study was carried out with the objective of developing
a numerical model for this area in order to understand the behaviour of the
system with the changes in hydrological stresses. The finite difference
computer code MODFLOW (Modular 3-d finite difference flow) with
Groundwater Modelling System (GMS) as pre- and post-processor was used
to simulate the groundwater flow in this study.
