3-D Groundwater Model to estimate the dynamic groundwater storage in Viang Papao Aquifers System

The Viang Papao situated in northern Thailand is an area that might become to serve for the quadrangle economic cooperation policy among Thailand, Laos PDR, China and Burma. Even water resource presently discloses no water scarcity, but the groundwater is supposed to support the water needed to the future economic expansion, but there is, up-to-now, no any investigation with regard to the groundwater storage in the basin. The groundwater storage is an important quantity to manage the groundwater in the future. Therefore we investigate this issue by means of a 3D numerical groundwater flow model (MODFLOW) for Viang Papao aquifers, whereby the goal of the investigation is on the estimation of the groundwater storage. By this study, we propose a new approach of Thailand to calculate the groundwater storage in term of the dynamic groundwater storage which closer reflects the quantity of developable groundwater from the basin by using the storage parameter rather than the old fashion of the static groundwater storage calculation. Based on first observational results of a recent exploratory hydrogeological investigation of the Thai Department of Groundwater Resources (DGR) in 2009, the aquifer system is modeled with a top unconfined aquifer layer and two underlying confined layers, each of them separated by an aquitard. The groundwater flow model is calibrated in steady-state and transient mode using observed piezometric heads for the various aquifer layers for the year 2009. The dynamic groundwater storage, aftermath, is numerically calculate based on the storage parameter and yields 430 million cubic meter.