Underground Research into Climate Change

Climate change is not only happening in the world we can see, but it is also happening in the world we cannot see, in places like the soil, subsurface waters and ground waters.

An international team of scientists from CSIRO Australia and USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is working to try and predict how climate change is impacting water that exists below ground level.

The only way to do this is to use simulated interactions between the soils and plants. This is important because it will show how sensitive the chain of soil to water to vegetation is to the climate changes. They did this by simulating daily weather patterns and matched them up with historical records and using that data were able to predict future climates.

The daily weather prediction that resulted was then entered into a model that represented all aspects of the soil, water, plant chain-how the soil adsorbs water, the way the water flows, and is stored in the soil, the level of surface evaporation, plant uptake of the water, the amount of water that is given off as vapor, and deep drainage below the roots of trees and grasses that eventually becomes groundwater recharge.

The results of the simulation were that changes in the temperatures and rainfall were found to affect the growth rates and leaf size of plants which impacts groundwater recharge. No plants, no water to go back into the ground Also in some of the test areas, the way the vegetation responded to climate change would cause the average recharge to decrease, but in other areas, the exact opposite happened and the recharge to groundwater would more than double.

The outcome of this research will play an important part in how land and water management agencies and policy makers all over the world deal with the future we face due to climate change.