Investigating the Variability in Groundwater Table Depth at a Global Scale

Groundwater represents a hugely important natural resource, providing billions of people around the world with drinking water.

However, the security of our global groundwater supplies is threatened: over-abstraction is leading to aquifer depletion in many regions and climate change is expected to alter recharge patterns.

It has been found that 43% of the Sustainable Development Goal targets can be directly linked to groundwater, yet our understanding of groundwater-related processes, including the impacts of climate change, is still limited.

The depth of the water table is a good indicator of the availability of groundwater to humans and wildlife, but we still only have a limited understanding of the drivers behind this.

A lack of data sharing until recent years has limited studies using in-situ data to regional scales, with global analyses instead being completed using hydrological models.

However, these generally have a number of limitations and can only provide a simplified version of the true state of global groundwater resources.