Groundwater Exploitation And Ecological Environment Protection In Weigan River Basin, Xinjiang, P.R. China

Study on the groundwater resources in arid regions has been one of the hot topics in the world. Northwestern China is one of the typical arid regions in the world, where lacks of water resources and the improper exploitation has been the key hindrance for the economic development and improvement of living condition for local residents. Moreover, it was the primary reason of the ecological environment getting worse and worse.The exploitation of the water resources in Northwestern China lacks of sufficient consideration on the water resources character in the arid regions. For a long time, the people have mainly utilized the surface water and ignored the groundwater resources exploitation in some areas, which led to the serious ecological unbalance: on the one hand the water resources are waste in vain, which aggravate soil salification. On the other hand the recharge quantity cut down, the vegetation ecological environment worsen, moreover some vegetation perish, the oais shrink and the desertification worsen etc..The paper took the Weigan River Basin in Xinjiang Autonomous Region as a case study. Based on the analysis about the hydrogeological character in the Weigan River Basin, a three-dimensional unsteady groundwater flow model including multilayer wells was established to research the distributing character of the groundwater flow through the numerical simulation, and the appropriate water resources exploitation mode to protect the ecological environment was discussed.The paper emphasized the method of the analogue simulating some main elements related to the groundwater flow numerical model in the arid regions Northwestern China. The model in the paper has some superiority as follows:1. Model layer division: According to the traditional method, a multilayer aquifer system was divided into odd layers, including the sand soil layer (the phreatic layer), soil layer (the first confining layer), the sand soil layer (the first confined layer), the soil layer (the second confining layer), and the sand soil layer (the second confined layer), and so on. Thus the phreatic layer...