Amid a rapidly worsening drought and a California mandate to bring aquifer withdrawals and deposits into balance by 2040, there’s now growing urgency to better understand the hidden structures of groundwater basins.
One possible solution to balancing the aquifer water budget involves strategically flooding a field, orchard or dedicated recharge pond and letting the water seep down through sandy channels. In research published earlier this month in Vadose Zone Journal, Knight and postdoctoral scholar Meredith Goebel demonstrate a new way to assess sites for this type of managed aquifer recharge using soil measurements and a geophysical system towed by an all-terrain vehicle.