Advanced Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (A-DInSAR) techniques and 3-D groundwater flow and geomechanical models are integrated to improve our knowledge about the Tertiary detritic aquifer of Madrid (TDAM). In particular, the attention is focused on the Manzanares-Jarama well field, located to the northwest of Madrid, which experienced five cycles of extensive groundwater withdrawal followed by natural recovery, to cope with the droughts occurred in summer 1995, 1999, 2002, 2006, and 2009. Piezometric records and A-DInSAR data acquired by ERS-1/2 and ENVISAT satellites during the periods 1992–2000 and 2002–2010, respectively, have been used to calibrate the groundwater flow and the geomechanical models. A time-lag of about one month between the hydraulic head changes and the displacements of the land surface has been detected by a joint wavelet analysis of A-DInSAR and piezometer head time series. Overall, the results show the effectiveness of the proposed integrated approach composed of A-DInSAR and 3-D geomechanical model to characterize the aquifer-system response during and after the groundwater withdrawal.
Groundwater numerical models provide a quantitative framework to understand the hydrogeological processes and represent a practical tool to comprehend how an aquifer system works (Anderson et al., 2015). Groundwater models integrate numerically the Partial differential equations governing the physical process of the water movement within a defined portion of a porous medium. Modelling design requires to set-up the model boundaries and geometry, provide the aquifer parameters and choose the code able to simulate the physical processes of interest (Anderson et al., 2015). Therefore, the groundwater model conceptualization needs extensive datasets that often lack due to the high costs required to collect.
Geographical location from Google Earth, Data SIO, NOAA, U.S.,
Navy, NGA, GEBCO, US Dept of State Geographer, ©2019 Google, Image
Landsat/Copernicus
To remediate, at least in part, this paucity of measurements, in this work a novel methodology using A-DInSAR data as supporting tool for groundwater modelling purposes is presented. The methodology has been developed and tested to understand the dynamic behaviour of the Madrid aquifer. It represents a strategic groundwater resource in Spain, exploited in the past to cope with an increased groundwater demand during drought periods. The achieved results give insight about a fast response of the aquifer-system during and after the extraction periods.
The study area is the Manzanares-Jarama wellfield, that is located northwest
of Madrid, in Spain (Fig. 1). The analysed wellfield includes 32 wells,
which withdraw groundwater from the “Manzanares-Jarama aquifer”, and 17
observation wells. The analysed aquifer extends for about 540 km
Line-of-sight (LOS) velocity maps measured usingERS-1/2
(1992–2000)
The analysed satellite data are Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images acquired by ERS-1/2 and ENVISAT in descending and ascending mode, respectively. The ERS-1/2 images cover the period from April 1992 to November 2000, and the ENVISAT dataset between August 2003 and September 2010. The ERS-1/2 and ENVISAT scenes were processed using the PSP-IFSAR technique (Costantini et al., 2008) to obtain the A-DInSAR dataset including line-of-sight (LOS) displacement time series and average velocity for each target in the periods 1992–2000 and 2003–2010 (Fig. 2).
Available observation well measurements recorded the hydraulic head changes from 1998 to 2012 (Fig. 3) and show three major extraction phases causing a groundwater drawdown of about 100–150 m, corresponding with major drought periods followed by recovery periods (Yélamos and Villarroya, 1991; Canal de Isabel II Gestión, 2014).
Piezometric head time series acquired in the period 1998–2010. The location of the observation wells is reported in Fig. 1b.
The methodology implemented by Tomás et al. (2016), based on a wavelet approach, was used for the joint analysis of the A-DInSAR and piezometric level time series to understand cause-and-effect relationships and to identify intermittent periodicity. On the other hand, Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT), was applied to identify nonstationary intermittent oscillations in time series data. Cross Wavelet Transform (XWT) and Wavelet Coherence (WTC) were applied to find the common power and relative phase in time-frequency space of two-time series (Grinsted et al., 2004). The result is a 2-D plot of complex numbers. A high absolute value suggests a common time patterns between both time series. Furthermore, the phase (i.e. the angle of the vectors) of the XWT provides a quantification of the time shift (delay time) between the two time-series. It is worth nothing that both the A-DInSAR and piezometric head time series have been preliminary equalized in the time sampling interval using a 35 d interval that corresponds to the revisit time of ERS and ENVISAT. Then, a linear regression of the time series records was used to distinguish linear and non-linear component. The wavelet approach has been applied using the non-linear component resulting from the difference between the original time-series and the fitted linear component.
Schematic overview of the integrated approach used to reconstruct the 3-D model with the support of A-DInSAR data.
In this work, the A-DInSAR data are used as supporting tool for different
phases of the numerical model reconstruction (Fig. 4). In particular, the
A-DInSAR data are exploited to (i) define the lateral boundaries of the
static model, (ii) estimate the model parametrization, (iii) choose an
appropriate code to simulate the physical processes, and (iv) to calibrate
of the model. The joint use of the wellfield location and the average
velocities measured by the A-DInSAR technique allows to identifying the
influence area of the wellfield. Furthermore, the piezometric head time
series and the displacement time series have been jointly used to estimate
the aquifer storage (
Finally, A-DInSAR displacement time series are used for cross-comparison with the simulated displacement to verify the model results.
The numerical approaches implemented in this work aims simulating
groundwater flow and pumping induced land displacements. First of all, a
static model is build up to reconstruct the three dimensional geometry
including the main hydrogeological layers of the study area. Then, the 3-D
static model is used for the hydrogeological and the geomechanical
simulations. More precisely, the 3-D finite element (FE) grid of the selected
domain is constructed using GEN3-D (Teatini et al., 2006). The groundwater
flow model is simulated through the SAT3-D (SATurated Three-Dimensional) code
(Teatini et al., 2011) that solves the following equation Eq. (2) (Bear
1972):
It is worth noting that:
The groundwater flow and geomechanical models are calibrated using a trial
and error approach. The hydraulic conductivity was calibrated the records at
the piezometric wells starting from values reported by Hernández Torrego (2012) and from values obtained via pumping test for pilot points (e.g. CB5
piezometer, see the location in Fig. 1). The Young modulus and Lamè
constants were calibrated using InSAR outcome. Consequently, the solution of
Eq. (1) must takes the elastic storage obtained using Eqs. (4) and (5)
starting from literature values (Ezquerro et al., 2014). Furthermore, for
the geomechanical model the Poisson's ratio
The analysis of the A-DInSAR displacement and the piezometric head time
series has been performed for 17 piezometers of the Manzanares-Jarama
wellfield using the wavelet approach as described in Sect. 3.1. The
results provide insight about a mean time lag of
3-D model of the Manzanares-Jarama wellfield
The join analysis of the satellite and piezometric data has provided
fundamental information to design and calibrate the 3-D model of the
Manzanares-Jarama well field. In particular, the model has been built
including three main hydrogeological units; i.e. the upper phreatic aquifer,
the intermediate aquitard and the lower confined aquifer (Fig. 5a). The
model domain extends for the upper 700 m of the sedimentary sequence, whose
top and bottom maps have been extracted by the ground surface elevation
using the high resolution 5 m cell digital elevation model from Instituto
Geográfico Nacional (IGN) and geological information (IGME, 1989). Since
the piezometric drawdown caused by the wellfield did not reach a distance
larger than 10 km from the wells, (Ezquerro et al., 2014; Béjar-Pizarro et al., 2017), the horizontally
domain extends in order to account a buffer ring of 10 km around the
wellfield. The aquifer's dynamic has been simulated during the period from
1994 to 2010, that includes four 1–1.5 year long periods of groundwater
withdrawal. The modelling results show that the periods of groundwater
extraction caused a land subsidence higher than 20 mm over an area of about
190 km
In this work, the potential of the integrated use of A-DInSAR data and 3-D groundwater flow and geomechanical models to capture and assess aquifer dynamics is shown. The approach has been applied to investigate the response during and after pumping of a portion of the Madrid aquifer. The aquifer-system has been characterized by a time-lag of about one month only between the hydraulic head changes and the land displacements, suggesting that the clayey units within the aquifer-system play a minor role.
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article.
RB built the three-dimensional numerical modeling for the Manzanares-Jarama wellfield and prepared the manuscript. CM provided support and guidance throughout the research process for the geological interpretation of the data. PT provided a guidance to build the groundwater flow and geomechanical models and he contributed to the analysis of the results. CZ and AF from UniPD supported the development of the groundwater flow and geomechanical models. FZ supported the numerical modeling and the interpretation of the results. GH provided the geological, the hydrogeological and A-DInSAR data and supported their analysis. PE and MBP from IGME supply the geological and hydrogeological interpretation of the study area. JAFM supported the interpretation of the geomechanical model. CGA provided a guidance for the interpretation of the groundwater flow model. RT and JLP performed the wavelet analysis. All authors co-wrote and reviewed the manuscript.
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
This article is part of the special issue “TISOLS: the Tenth International Symposium On Land Subsidence – living with subsidence”. It is a result of the Tenth International Symposium on Land Subsidence, Delft, the Netherlands, 17–21 May 2021.
The research was funded by University of Pavia in the framework of a
research grant award “assegno di tipo A premiale” for research activities
at the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences, within the research
project entitled “Sustainable groundwater resources management by
integrating A-DInSAR derived monitoring and flow modeling results” assigned
to Roberta Bonì in March 2019 (supv. Claudia Meisina). The activity has
been developed within the scientific collaboration established in the
framework of the UNESCO Land Subsidence International Initiative (LaSII,
This research has been supported by the Università degli Studi di Pavia (Assegno di tipo A premiale: “Sustainable groundwater resources management by integrating A-DInSAR derived monitoring and flow modeling results” assigned to Roberta Bonì in March 2019) and the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO), the State Agency of Research (AEI), and the European Funds for Regional Development (FEDER) (grant no. TEC2017-85244-C2-1-P).