Proceedings of the 2020 Mississippi Water Resources Conference

Year: 2020 Authors: Han Y., Feng G., Ouyang Y., Jin W., Liu Z., Jenkins J.

The groundwater was heavily used for irrigating crops in Big Sunflower River Watershed (BSRW). Traditionally, many farmers chose to flood irrigation, which wasted large amount of groundwater and resulted in severe groundwater table declining. This study applied a coupled SWAT-MODFLOW model to investigate the influence of different agricultural water management practices on groundwater budget. The agricultural water management practices are composed of (1) pumping groundwater for irrigation based on farmers' conventional irrigation schedule. (2) Drafting groundwater for irrigation in terms of plant water demand (3) No irrigation on farmland. Comparing groundwater recharge, groundwater irrigation amount, groundwater return flow and groundwater ET to obtain the difference of groundwater budget in three agricultural water management practices. Cell-wise water table elevation for three agricultural water management practices will indicate the groundwater table spatial distribution characteristics. Results can assist with groundwater management.