The Role of Groundwater Drought on Impacting Socio-economics in Germany

Climate change and anthropogenic activities are increasing stress on groundwater resources, even in generally water-rich areas like Germany, posing significant threats to socio-economic and ecological systems. As the perception of groundwater impacts is often slow and implicit, it results in limited understanding of groundwater drought impacts on socio-economics. To investigate these impacts, we use a unique biweekly dataset of 28,540 shallow and deep groundwater observations from 1950 to 2022 collated from German water authorities. We thoroughly check data quality by conducting outlier tests based on local outlier factor and dynamic time warping, assessing homogeneity of time series by identifying abrupt level shifts and imputing short periods (i.e., 14 days) of missing data by linear interpolation. Based on the reliable dataset, we identify groundwater drought periods along with their severity, duration, and spatial extent. We then link these drought periods to a multi-sectoral drought impact dataset based on newspaper articles from 2000 to 2022 [Sodoge et al., 2023] at a national scale, allowing us to investigate how groundwater drought contributes to socio-economic and ecological impacts (e.g., agriculture, forestry, livestock, wildfires). The results from this study are expected to differentiate the impacts of groundwater drought from other hydrometeorological droughts, provide insights into the long-term impacts of droughts, and help coordinate groundwater resources management and policy development at a national level.

Sodoge, J., C. Kuhlicke, and M. M. de Brito (2023), Automatized spatio-temporal detection of drought impacts from newspaper articles using natural language processing and machine learning, Weather and Climate Extremes, 41, 100574.