Groundwater; Water quality; Time-series analysis; Climate change
Figura Simon, Livingstone David M., Kipfer Rolf (2015), Forecasting groundwater temperature with linear regression models using historical data, in
Groundwater, 53(6), 943-954.
Figura Simon, Livingstone David M., Kipfer Rolf (2014), Einflüsse auf die Sauerstoffkonzentration in alluvialem Grundwasser, in
Hydrologie und Wasserbewirtschaftung, 58(1), 49-49.
Figura Simon, Livingstone David M., Kipfer Rolf (2013), Competing controls on groundwater oxygen concentration revealed in multidecadal time-series from riverbank filtration sites, in
Water Resources Research, 49(11), 7411-7426.
Figura Simon, Livingstone David M., Hoehn Eduard, Kipfer Rolf (2013), Klima und Grundwasser: Rückblicke und Vorhersagen von Temperatur und Sauerstoff mittels historischer Aufzeichnungen, in
Aqua & Gas, 2013(7/8), 28-33.
Scheiwiller Susanne, Figura Simon, Hoehn Eduard, Haldimann Peter (2013), Klimaänderung und Karstquellenertrag: Zeitreihen-Analyse des Ertrags der Pertusio-Quelle (TI) und Ursprung-Quelle (NW), in
Aqua & Gas, 2013(7/8), 14-20.
Figura Simon (2013),
The impact of climate change on groundwater temperature and oxygen concentration in Swiss aquifers, ETH, Zürich.
Schürch Marc, Hoehn Eduard, Figura Simon, Kipfer Rolf (2011), Auswirkungen des Klimawandels auf das Grundwasser, in
Gas Wasser Abwasser, 91(3), 177-182.
Figura Simon, Livingstone David M., Hoehn Eduard, Kipfer Rolf (2011), Regime shift in groundwater temperature triggered by the Arctic Oscillation., in
Geophysical Research Letters, 38(23), 1-5.
Knowledge of the potential impacts of climate change on our water resources is essential for their medium to long term management. The most important water resources, nationally and internationally, are groundwaters, and to a lesser extent lakes and rivers. For lakes and rivers on several continents, the availability of long-term historical instrumental monitoring data has allowed decadal-scale trends and fluctuations in their physical behaviour to be analysed, providing evidence of the large-scale impact of climatic forcing on these water bodies and showing that climate change is already having a substantial influence on them. For groundwaters, a lack of long-term instrumental data in machine-readable form has meant that essentially nothing is known about their response to climatic forcing and climate change. However, historical instrumental monitoring data on groundwaters in Switzerland do exist, and are now in the process of being made available in machine-readable form. In this project, we propose to analyse these unique and valuable data to determine whether Swiss groundwater bodies are exhibiting a regionally coherent physical response to climatic forcing, whether climate change is having an impact on groundwater in terms of long-term trends and decadal fluctuations, and to what extent the impact depends on the type of groundwater body (e.g., young groundwater recharged by river infiltration, young groundwater recharged by precipitation or old groundwater). The results of two pilot studies on already digitized data sets from groundwater bodies recharged mainly by river infiltration show groundwater temperature to have been undergoing a significant long-term increase, while oxygen concentrations have been decreasing. However, because general conclusions cannot be drawn from only two individual case studies, we propose to analyse many more data sets from various types of groundwater body throughout Switzerland. This project is expected to result in a general assessment of the decadal-scale behaviour of various types of groundwater body throughout Switzerland and its relationship to climatic forcing and climate change.