ABSTRACT
The Murray Groundwater Basin is a very valuable but equally sensitive water resource that covers about a third of the Murray-Darling drainage basin (Fig. 10.1). There are two main pressing issues relating to groundwater management in this region. First, increased groundwater recharge inherited from the historical clearing of the region continues to infl uence groundwater levels leading to dryland salinity in many areas. Second, the demand for groundwater is currently increasing, mostly to paliate for the low reliability of surface water resources. However, sustainable yields are already exceeded in some aquifers and it is not well known how resilient the aquifers of the region are to prolonged droughts. The main aim of this study is to provide long-term observations of groundwater dynamics in the Murray Groundwater Basin. These observations are then used to estimate the respective impact from past land clearing and the recent drought on groundwater resources in the basin. For this we used two main sources of information: (1)
in-situ point observations of groundwater levels at monitoring bores and (2) regional estimates of variations in water storage from space gravimetry GRACE (GRGS) and a hydrological model (GLDAS).
