A Spatiotemporal Stochastic Framework Of Groundwater Fluctuation Analysis On The South - Eastern Part Of The Great Hungarian Plain

Abstract

Abstract The current study was performed on a Hungarian area where the groundwater has been highly affected in the past 40 years by climate change. The stochastic estimation framework of groundwater as a spatiotemporally varying dynamic phenomenon is proposed. The probabilistic estimation of the water depth is performed as a joint realization of spatially correlated hydrographs, where parametric temporal trend models are fitted to the measured time series thereafter regionalized in space. Two types of trend models are evaluated. Due to its simplicity the purely mathematical trend can be used to analyze long-term groundwater trends, the average water fluctuation range and to determine the most probable date of peak groundwater level. The one which takes advantage of the knowledge of expected groundwater changes, clearly over performed the purely mathematical model, and it is selected for the construction of a spatiotemporal trend. Model fitting error values are considered as a set of stochastic time series which expresses short-term anomalies of the groundwater, and they are modelled as joint space-time distribution. The resulting spatiotemporal residual field is added to the trend field, thus resulting 125 simulated realizations, which are evaluated probabilistically. The high number of joint spatiotemporal realizations provides alternative groundwater datasets as boundary conditions for a wide variety of environmental models, while the presented procedure behaves more robust over non-complete datasets.