Groundwater quantity and quality assessments traditionally rely on periodic observations, long-term trends, and threshold-based indicators. While these approaches underpin monitoring and regulatory assessment, emerging data and analytical capabilities raise a fundamental question: are we assessing groundwater through the wrong lens?
Groundwater observations can provide information not only on system status, but also on aquifer dynamics and functioning. Aquifers receive climatic and anthropogenic forcing and transform these signals through their hydrogeological properties, storage, connectivity, memory, and characteristic response times. Understanding these dynamics can reveal how groundwater systems respond to pressures, whether their behaviour is changing, and how they recover from disturbances—information that may remain hidden when assessment is limited to trends, averages, or threshold exceedances.
This session invites contributions exploring new ways to characterize and assess groundwater quantity and quality through the analysis of aquifer dynamics. We welcome studies using continuous and high-frequency records, multi-source observations, time-series analysis, dynamic indicators, response and recovery metrics, change detection, and other observational or analytical approaches. Particular interest is given to studies that characterize aquifer response, identify climatic and anthropogenic controls, detect changes in system behaviour, assess resilience, or translate dynamic information into meaningful indicators of groundwater condition.
The aim is to explore how a better understanding of aquifer dynamics can complement conventional groundwater assessment and support more diagnostic and anticipatory approaches to monitoring and management. Ultimately, the session asks: what can groundwater dynamics tell us about the condition and evolution of aquifers that snapshots, averages, trends, and thresholds cannot?