Question Description
4) Here is a drinking water treatment facility of a town in Alabama that primarily uses GW wells. https://www.dothan.org/DocumentCenter/View/2472/Dothan-Drinking- Water-Quality-Report-2016?bidId=
They provide 12 million gallons of water per day (or 4380 million gallon/year), all pumped from groundwater wells. In order for this system to be sustainable we need to put back about 4380 million gallons of water/year back into the system as recharge from rain. If the Mayor of the town provided a project to you to assess whether GW sustainable long-term resource for Dothan. In order to make this assessment, first you need to get the rainfall data over the catchment area to do some basic calculations to find out what is net recharge into this system. Note the entire rainfall will not be recharge; the net recharge will be rainfall subtracted from plant evapotranspiration, soil moisture storage, runoff and other losses. Make an estimate for rainfall and other losses and evaluate whether GW is a sustainable resource for this city. Read and find the methods for computing net recharge and then do your own calculations and estimations to complete this assessment and advice this city whether they should be using the local GW aquifers or not. Make sure you also document some of the limitations of your calculations.
The length of this report can vary from about 2 or 3 pages to 20 pages, your choice.