UC Irvine

Most people think of groundwater as a resource, but it is also a useful indicator of climate variability and human impacts on the environment. Groundwater storage varies slowly relative to other non-frozen components of the water cycle, encapsulating long period variations and trends in surface meteorology. On seasonal to interannual timescales, groundwater is as dynamic as soil moisture (Rodell and Famiglietti 2001; Alley et al. 2002), and it has been shown that groundwater storage changes have contributed to sealevel variations (Milly et al. 2003; Wada et al. 2010).