Water Budget

Abstract

A quantitative understanding of aquifer water budgets is critical for effective, long-term water management. Water budgets can be directly calculated assuming that sufficient data are available. However, water budgets are now much more commonly implicitly evaluated as part of numerical surface-water and groundwater models or integrated surface-water/groundwater models. Nevertheless, development of accurate conceptual models, and in turn, numerical models of hydrologic systems requires knowledge of the main components of their water budgets and their magnitudes.