Impacts of Seasonal Variation in Groundwater Availability on the Hydrological Regime of the Pantanal Basin

• Grant number: 23/10474-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: November 01, 2023
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Geosciences - Geology
• Principal Investigator: Didier Gastmans
• Grantee: Bruno Henrique Valdambrini Vieira
• Host Institution: Centro de Estudos Ambientais (CEA). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Rio Claro. Rio Claro , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/03093-4 - Exploring the Pantanal's Hydrological Past: An Artificial Intelligence Approach for Modeling of EWH with In Situ River Flow Data, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

The Pantanal basin has complex hydrological dynamics that are closelylinked to its structural control and the seasonality of the rainfall regime. Simultaneously,the economic exploitation of natural resources, climate change and the change invegetation cover influence the hydrological dynamics, noticibly the change in wateravailability, the acceleration of erosion / depositional processes, the consequentreduction in the base level of rivers and also the flooding of channels. These factorsmake an interdisciplinary diagnosis of the region urgent, with a view to theanthropogenic factors of impact and in order to identify trends and patterns of changeover time. The objective of this research is to evaluate the seasonal impacts ofunderground water availability in the hydrological regime of the Pantanal basin. In thiscase, gravity signals obtained by the GRACE satellite and converted into changes in theintegrated water column will be used, in addition to timeseries of surface water heightobtained by measurements of river level collected in situ by ANA stations. Thus, it will bepossible to obtain a linear correlation between the dynamics of surface and groundwaterand to detect the oscillations of the total water column in the basin due to high and lowflow scenarios, considering the role of this context in the hydrological cycle andevaluating the correlation of the observed processes with anthropogenic coefficients ofclimate change and/or suppression of vegetation cover.