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Datasets: Quantifying Groundwater Depletion in an Agricultural Region Using Integrated In-Situ and Satellite-Based Approaches: Insights from the San Luis Valley, CO


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Created: Nov 17, 2025 at 6:10 p.m. (UTC)
Last updated: Jan 10, 2026 at 5:01 p.m. (UTC)
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Abstract

Sustainable groundwater management requires accurate tools to assess changes in aquifer storage as climate extremes intensify and water demand grows. Currently, inadequate in-situ data and uncertainty in storativity estimates limit such assessments. We address these challenges by integrating in-situ observations with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) to estimate aquifer properties and groundwater storage change in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. We estimate storativity for management subdistricts based on the relationship between pumping and water levels, comparing a constant net inflow assumption against a refined time-varying net inflow regression that incorporates climate drivers. Both approaches yield consistent results across diverse hydrogeological settings, producing storativity estimates ranging from 0.03 in primarily confined aquifers to 0.21 in unconfined aquifers. Our results reveal a declining trend in groundwater storage, with a total storage loss of 6.3×10^8 m³ from coarse-grained layers for our studied subdistricts from 2010 to 2023, driven primarily by drought conditions. We further quantified the partitioning of storage loss, finding that in regions with significant pumping from confined aquifers, inelastic compaction accounts for a much higher portion of the total water withdrawn (39%) compared to regions where pumping is mainly from the unconfined aquifer (9%). In that case, gravity drainage is the dominant mechanism. Conversely, confined aquifers with no long-term depletion show elastic deformation patterns, with no storage loss in fine-grained units. This research offers a transferable framework for assessing groundwater storage loss and prospects for sustainability in data-limited regions and supports adaptive management in water-stressed basins worldwide.

Subject Keywords

Coverage

Spatial

Coordinate System/Geographic Projection:
WGS 84 EPSG:4326
Coordinate Units:
Decimal degrees
North Latitude
38.4000°
East Longitude
-105.3000°
South Latitude
36.9900°
West Longitude
-106.7000°

Temporal

Start Date:
End Date:

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Credits

Funding Agencies

This resource was created using funding from the following sources:
Agency Name Award Title Award Number
National Institutes of Health The Impact of Drought on Arsenic Exposure and Cardiometabolic Outcomes in a Rural Aging Population 5R01ES032612-03
USDA NIFA Agricultural Experiment Station Towards sustainable agriculture in the San Luis Valley, Colorado: improved estimates of recharge and water budgets with remote sensing and in-situ data COL00436

How to Cite

Al Fatta, A., R. Smith, S. Vajedian, W. Schreuder, J. J. B. Jr. (2026). Datasets: Quantifying Groundwater Depletion in an Agricultural Region Using Integrated In-Situ and Satellite-Based Approaches: Insights from the San Luis Valley, CO, HydroShare, http://www.hydroshare.org/resource/dd603fab24da4502901b213e68ba0f5f

This resource is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
CC-BY

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