Salt Lake County Aquifers

Aquifer skeletons deform actively in response to groundwater redistribution and hydraulic head change with various time scales of delay and sensitivity. However, determining the key hydrogeological properties generally requires the analysis of dense water gauge data and expensive drilling data. I investigated the spatiotemporal correlation among various hydrological records and ground deformation measured by InSAR observations in Salt Lake Valley, Utah. InSAR results show a clear long-term and seasonal correlation between surface uplift/subsidence and groundwater recharge/discharge, with evidence for the net uplift of 15 mm/yr for a period of six years. The long-term uplift, remarkably bounded by faults and contained within the water discharge area, reflects a net increase in pore pressure associated with a prolonged water recharge that probably occurred decades ago. The deformation and its correlation with head changes allow us to quantify hydrogeological properties. The decay coefficient and the distribution of both previously mapped faults and newly mapped faults within the fields of deformation suggest that the faults disrupt the groundwater flow and partition the hydrological units [Hu et al., 2018, JGR].