Handbook of Water Harvesting and Conservation

14Rainwater Harvesting Impact on Urban Groundwater

A. Jebamalar¹, R. Sudharsanan¹, G. Ravikumar², and Saeid Eslamian³

¹Velammal Engineering College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

²College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

³Department of Water Engineering, College of Agriculture, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran

14.1 Introduction

Groundwater is the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet and is intensively exploited for private, domestic, and industrial uses in many urban centers of the developing world. Exploitation of groundwater resource may lead to several vexing problems like reduced well yields, land subsidence, and intrusion of salty water, especially in coastal areas. In order to overcome these serious environmental implications and to improve the groundwater levels, it is necessary to artificially recharge the depleted aquifers. An underground water banking technique known as aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) (Elise Bekele et al. 2018) has emerged as a means of expanding urban water resources by harvesting waters that would otherwise be foregone.

Groundwater is derived from any surface water source (rain, snow melt, or surface runoff) that infiltrates the land surface and slowly percolates to the water table. This process of adding water to underground storage is called “natural” groundwater recharge. Where the materials in the earths' surface are coarse and the slope of the land is gentle, there is generally more ...