Impacts of Receding of the Lakes Located in the Arid and Semi-arid Areas on the Coastal Groundwater: Integrated Modeling and Experimental Study

The dropping of the water level of the lakes located in the arid lands leads to salt concentration increase. In this study, a combined experimental-computational method is developed to explore the effect of seawater concentration on the elevation of groundwater table and the rate of saltwater intrusion, while the lake water level is dropping. At the laboratory tank scale, we have collected experimental data by varying the saltwater concentration by 2.0 and 2.5 times its initial value while measuring the height of the groundwater table. Our simulation has shown an unexpected increase in height of groundwater by 5.0 and 13.0% relative to the head difference at the boundaries of the domain. Also, the intrusion rate of saltwater wedge increased by 2.0 and 3.0 times, respectively. We have used the verified model for a field state and found that if density variations are neglected in simulation, the calculated groundwater level is affected more than 2 times in response to fluctuation of lake water level (relative to simulations by including the effect of fluid density changes). Based on the results density variations can counteract; even reverse, the effect of water table changes. Remarkably, our simulations have shown that despite a severe decrease in the water level of a saline lake over time, the saltwater wedge has indeed intruded further because of the substantial increase in the density of the lake water due to the rising salinity. Based on the findings, to reach a reasonable result in the study of interaction between saline water of shrinking lakes with coastal groundwater, saltwater concentration as well as saline water density in the modeling must be considered.