Groundwater models and hydrological reconstruction

Last updated: August 2026

About

Groundwater supports ecosystems, communities, agriculture, and industry, yet aquifer properties and long-term recharge histories are rarely known in enough detail to make reliable predictions. Borehole records and hydrological observations provide valuable constraints, but they need to be combined with physical models that represent groundwater flow and its uncertainty.

This project will develop groundwater models at continental, basin, or local scales. It will calibrate them against borehole and observational data, then use inversion to reconstruct past conditions and assess how aquifer systems respond to environmental change and water use.

Research questions

• Which observations best constrain groundwater flow, storage, recharge, and aquifer properties?
• How can inverse methods recover past hydrological conditions from incomplete records?
• How does uncertainty in geology, forcing, and data coverage affect predictions?

Methods and data

Projects can use borehole logs, water-level observations, geological models, hydrogeological maps, remote sensing, numerical groundwater flow models, and inverse methods.

Possible projects

Possible directions include building a model for a selected basin, inferring recharge or permeability from observations, reconstructing a historical groundwater change, or comparing local and continental modelling approaches.

Essential background

Useful preparation includes hydrology, hydrogeology, Earth science, engineering, mathematics, programming, or data analysis.