Updated estimates of water budget components for the Mississippi Embayment Region using a soil-water-balance model, 2000–2020

Abstract

A Soil-Water-Balance (SWB) model for the Mississippi embayment region in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana was constructed and calibrated to gain insight into potential recharge patterns for the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer, which has had substantial drawdown under intense pumping stress over the last several decades. An analysis of the net infiltration term from the SWB model combined with newly gathered airborne electromagnetic geophysical data on the surficial sediments in a calibrated modular three-dimensional finite-difference (MODFLOW 6) groundwater flow model of one area in the alluvial plain found that the distribution of net infiltration was significantly different from the recharge that gets to the water table through the complicated silt and clay stratigraphy of the unsaturated zone. The net infiltration of water through the rooting zone as simulated by SWB ranges from 5.7 to 12.3 inches per year in the alluvial plain part of the model domain, and is fairly evenly distributed within local areas. Recharge to the underlying aquifer is less and is much more focused in particular zones where the connectivity through the upper layers of the unsaturated zone above the water table is greater, indicating possible horizontal flow and perched water table conditions in the unsaturated zone. Runoff and net infiltration together account for 32 percent of the incoming precipitation overall and somewhat higher percentages in the alluvial plain area on an annual basis. These terms are much higher in the fall and winter than in the summer. Actual evapotranspiration accounts for between 62 and 72 percent on average of the annual precipitation but dominates all other terms in the summer months. Without irrigation, summertime net infiltration and runoff would be near zero in the crop-dominated alluvial plain area. The SWB model reproduced reported irrigation rates for corn, soybeans, rice, and cotton on an annual basis fairly well. The SWB model for the Mississippi embayment region was calibrated using more than 15,000 observations representing four parts of the calculated water budget: actual evapotranspiration, surface runoff, net infiltration, and irrigation. Using a Monte Carlo approach to determine the uncertainty in the model results stemming from the uncertainty in the model parameters used in the calibration, the uncertainty in the annual actual evapotranspiration values was around 5 percent, whereas the uncertainty in the irrigation, net infiltration, and runoff was around 20 percent.