Spatio-Temporal Variability of Groundwater Level in the Middle Heihe River Basin

Groundwater plays a significant role in conserving the sustainable development of ecological environment in arid and semi-arid regions.As a management and decision tool,the method of geostatistics has been widely applied to study the spatio-temporal variability of groundwater level.Taking the Zhangye Oasis in the middle Heihe River Basin as an example,the authors have analyzed the spatial heterogeneity of groundwater depth in this area and have figured out the distribution of groundwater resources by the geostatistics method combined with GIS.The results indicated that the groundwater depth distribution exhibit strong spatial variability mainly controlled by structural factors on different scales,and the variograms are anisotropy.The map of groundwater level contours interpolated by the Kriging interpolation showed that there is a decreasing trend in groundwater depth from southwest to northeast in Zhangye Oasis.