SEAWAT model used to evaluate water management issues in the Santa Barbara and Foothill groundwater basins, California

Description

The city of Santa Barbara, in cooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) California Water Science Center, developed a three-dimensional density-dependent groundwater-flow and solute-transport model (the Santa Barbara Flow and Transport Model, or SBFTM), based on an existing groundwater-flow model, to simulate seawater intrusion into the Santa Barbara basin under various management strategies. In 2014, California adopted historic legislation to manage its groundwater: the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). Santa Barbara is interested in developing a better understanding of the sustainability of its groundwater supplies to avoid undesirable results: significant and unreasonable groundwater-level declines, reduction in groundwater storage, seawater intrusion, water-quality degradation, land subsidence, and surface-water depletion. The SBFTM uses the USGS code SEAWAT to simulate salinity transport and variable-density flow. The completed SBFTM was coupled with a management optimization tool, Borg, to develop five optimization scenarios that allow the decision makers to evaluate a range of optimal solutions given current water levels and chloride concentrations, and possible future climatic conditions. This USGS data release contains all of the input and output files for the simulations described in the associated model documentation report (https://doi.org/10.3133/sir20185059)

Resources

Name Format Description Link
55 The metadata original format https://data.usgs.gov/datacatalog/metadata/USGS.349d66d4-6f9c-4137-8e38-250526d83ef1.xml
55 Landing page for access to the data https://doi.org/10.5066/F74J0DF5

Tags

  • environment
  • groundwater
  • seawat
  • optimization
  • santa-barbara-county
  • usgsgroundwatermodel
  • geoscientificinformation
  • california
  • transport-model
  • inlandwaters
  • groundwater-model
  • groundwater-management
  • santa-barbara-city
  • usgs-349d66d4-6f9c-4137-8e38-250526d83ef1
  • saltwater-intrusion

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Categories