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Groundwater Flow Across Spatial Scales: Importance For Climate Modeling, Nir Krakauer, Haibin Li, Ying Fan

Publications and Research

Current regional and global climate models generally do not represent groundwater flow between grid cells as a component of the water budget. We estimate the magnitude of between cell groundwater flow as a function of grid cell size by aggregating results from a numerical model of equilibrium groundwater flow run and validated globally. We find that over a broad range of cell sizes spanning that of state of the art regional and global climate models, mean between cell groundwater flow magnitudes scale with the reciprocal of grid cell length. We also derive this scaling a priori from a simple statistical …