Effects of Nuanced Changes in Lot Layout and Impervious Area Connectivity on Urban Recharge

Background/Need: It has long been assumed that urbanization and the associated loss of pervious area leads to a decrease in groundwater recharge, but recent studies have produced conflicting results. While the importance of impervious area arrangement and connectivity has
been demonstrated in rainfall-runoff studies at various scales, very little work has been done to addresses how such differences in impervious area configuration may affect localized recharge rates. There is a need for physically based modeling efforts which are complex enough to calculated percolation through the unsaturated zone and detailed enough to capture nuanced differences in impervious area configuration at the surface.
Objectives: The objective of this study is to determine the extent to which the arrangement and connectivity of impervious areas in urban
residential lots impacts growing season recharge using lot-scale, physically based models.