Master thesis

Xunyu Fan (2015)
Estimating groundwater recharge in Germany, Israel and Costa Rica with the help of unsaturated soil zone models. Master thesis, TU Dresden, October 2015

ABSTRACT

The evaluation of groundwater recharge plays an important role in the sustainable water management. The groundwater rechange can be assessed by the different numerical models; in this study, the Hydrus-1D, SWAP and VS2DTI models were applied in the unsaturated soils of three study cases in different climate regions, i.e. Brandis (Germany), Israel and Costa Rica. In order to investigate the model applicability for each climate region, soil water content and bottom flux at the observation points were simulated by three models during the whole study periods and then compared with the measured data. The accordance between simulation and observation values has been statistically evaluated by calculating the average root mean square error (RMSE) and normalized root mean square error (NRMSE). In the study site in Brandis (Germany), Hydrus-1D provided the best simulation results; in the study site in Israel, both Hydrus-1D and SWAP model exhibited good precision; in addition, in Costa Rica, almost the same results of water content and bottom flux have been achieved from those three models.