| Groundwater is one of the major natural resource constraints for growth in arid and semi-arid regions. A common management goal is to fully analyze water resources for economic and social benefit.{09}However, sustainable management of aquifers is a complex issue that requires a delicate balance between the abstractions and recharges. In semi-arid coastal regions, critical issues like baseflows to the bays, saltwater intrusion and over-exploitation make the management of groundwater important and challenging. The overall goal of this research is to develop a transparent and pragmatic decision support framework that can guide the groundwater planners and decision makers to formulate and evaluate sustainable regional groundwater management policies in semiarid regions such as South Texas.; Simulation - Optimization had been identified as a useful framework to manage groundwater resources as it can effectively couple hydrogeologic models with management paradigms. However, in order to successfully apply this framework, the uncertainties that are inherent to this approach needed to be effectively characterized and quantified. Hence, as part of this research, approaches that identify and quantify various uncertainties associated with model development and application have been developed. Several significant research results that are of direct relevance to sustainable groundwater management in South Texas were obtained as part of this study. These include (i) development of a simulation-optimization framework to estimate groundwater availability, (ii) development of a methodology to evaluate alternate models that reconciles the simulation model uncertainties, (iii) development of interval optimization approaches to prioritize management efforts to reduce uncertainty and (iv) development of game-theoretic approaches to analyze the impacts of policy choices made by one county over the other. In addition, the framework and the tools identified to address the challenges in groundwater management can be adopted elsewhere with little or no modification. |
