New 1-Kilometer Global Model Maps the Past and Future of the World’s Groundwater

Beneath nearly every landscape on Earth lies a vast, hidden reservoir. Groundwater accounts for roughly 98 percent of the planet’s accessible fresh liquid water, and more than half of global river flow is sustained by it. Yet despite its central role in agriculture, drinking water supplies, and ecosystems, groundwater remains remarkably poorly observed: the most comprehensive global monitoring dataset contains about 180,000 well time series from just 41 countries, with more than 90 percent of those records concentrated in North America, Australia, or Europe. For much of the world, the water table is effectively unmeasured. A new study published in Earth System Dynamics by Barry van Jaarsveld of Utrecht University and colleagues now offers a way to fill that void, presenting the first monthly estimates of global groundwater levels at a resolution of roughly one kilometer, spanning both the historical record from 1960 to 2019 and projections through the year 2100.

The model at the heart of the study, called GLOBGM v1.1, is a two-layer, transient groundwater flow model built on a parallelized prototype of the widely used MODFLOW6 code. To make a global simulation at 30-arcsecond resolution computationally feasible, the researchers split the planet into four independent but coupled continental-scale models covering Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Australia, and the remaining islands. Each of these is further partitioned into non-overlapping sub-models that are solved together within the MODFLOW linear solver. The two-layer design allows the model to represent unconfined, confined, and semi-confined aquifer systems: where a confining layer exists, the upper layer represents that barrier and the lower layer the pressurized aquifer beneath it. Forcing data, including runoff, recharge, and groundwater abstraction, come from the global hydrological model PCR-GLOBWB2, resampled from its native 5-arcminute grid down to the finer GLOBGM grid.

Two technical innovations distinguish this version from its predecessor. The first is a dynamic drainage elevation routine, in which the elevation at which water drains from the groundwater system adjusts according to soil saturation. As soils become wetter, the drainage level rises toward the surface; as they dry, it drops. This coupling, based on the improved ARNO scheme for identifying saturated areas, keeps simulated water levels closer to the surface in wetland regions and suppresses unrealistic head fluctuations and intermittent discharge events. The second is a statistical downscaling of groundwater recharge. Because PCR-GLOBWB2 is known to underestimate recharge, particularly in arid and semi-arid regions where recharge is low and episodic, the team used a Generalized Additive Model trained on observed recharge data to produce a kilometer-scale recharge field, then applied a multiplicative correction factor to the model’s monthly recharge inputs, capped at local precipitation to preserve numerical stability.

Calibration was a major undertaking. The team tested 162 permutations of prefactors applied to hydraulic conductivity, anisotropy, and entrance resistance, varying the conductivity adjustments by lithological class drawn from the global GLiM dataset. Candidate settings were evaluated against long-term average water table depths from 34,800 observation wells in IGRAC’s Global Groundwater Monitoring Network, deliberately excluding known groundwater abstraction hotspots so that depletion would not be confused with model error. The best-performing configuration reduced the mean bias in water table depth from minus 4.8 meters in the uncalibrated predecessor to 3.6 meters, with the depth-weighted bias falling from 34.2 to 32.5 meters. The improvements were most pronounced for shallow water tables, which matter most for human use and for sustaining ecosystems through baseflow.

Validation against independent observations showed that the model produces skillful predictions, measured by a non-parametric Kling-Gupta Efficiency skill score, in approximately 83 percent of shallow to intermediate wells with water tables between zero and 60 meters deep when compared at the monthly scale, and in about 60 percent of deep wells exceeding 60 meters. At the annual scale, 71 percent of shallow wells and 66 percent of deep wells were skillful. The depth dependence is physically sensible: deeper aquifers respond slowly to recharge through thick unsaturated zones that the model does not explicitly resolve. To check performance at scales where point observations are absent, the team compared simulated total water storage anomalies with satellite gravimetry from the GRACE and GRACE-FO missions, finding agreement in trend direction over 62.3 percent of the global land surface and agreement in both direction and magnitude over 45.7 percent, consistent with other state-of-the-art global hydrological models.

The researchers also added a machine learning bias correction. A two-stage LightGBM ensemble, one classifier predicting whether the model overestimates or underestimates groundwater heads and one regressor predicting the magnitude of the error, was trained on nearly 97,000 observation wells using model parameters, Google’s AlphaEarth geospatial embeddings, and absolute latitude as a proxy for aridity. Training and testing were separated spatially using K-means clustering to prevent autocorrelation from inflating performance. The correction correctly predicted the direction of bias in 80 percent of holdout cases and shifted median bias toward zero across all depth classes, with the largest gains in deep wells. An asymmetric ramp-factor scheme prevents the correction from pushing simulated water tables unrealistically close to the land surface, preserving the model’s physics where it matters most.

The historical simulation from 1960 to 2019, driven by the ISIMIP3a observational forcing, reproduced the world’s best-documented groundwater depletion zones with striking fidelity: the southern and central High Plains of the United States, Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indo-Gangetic Plain all show the deepening water tables that independent observations have recorded. The model also identified rising water tables in regions known to be gaining storage, including the Guarani aquifer in South America, the northern Great Plains of North America, and the Karoo Basin in South Africa. Intriguingly, it flagged rising water tables across northern latitudes and the Arctic, potentially linked to climate-driven increases in recharge, though the authors caution that these areas overlap with permafrost zones where the model is known to be less reliable.

The future projections, run with five global climate models under three combined socioeconomic and climate scenarios from ISIMIP3b, paint a nuanced picture. Globally, more regions are projected to see rising than falling water tables through 2100, consistent with an intensifying hydrological cycle, and the pace of change increases from the low-emission SSP1-RCP2.6 scenario to the high-emission SSP5-RCP8.5. Water tables are projected to rise across much of the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, North America’s Pacific Coast, the Tibetan Plateau, and the Arabian Peninsula, while declines are projected for the Mediterranean, southeastern Australia, and the African and South American tropics. Europe stands out as the sole continent where water tables are expected to deepen markedly, particularly under high emissions. Known depletion hotspots are expected to persist, and the model projects continued declines over southern Europe, the Amazon, California’s Central Valley, and the High Plains, diverging from earlier studies that omitted groundwater abstraction, a difference the authors attribute to the inclusion of human water demand.

The team is transparent about the model’s limits. Simulations are flagged as less reliable in karst aquifers, where Darcian flow assumptions break down; in permafrost regions, where frozen ground complicates recharge; and in steep mountainous terrain, where the schematization is too coarse to resolve hillslope hydrology. Quality assurance maps accompany the dataset so users can interpret results appropriately. All simulations, along with the model code, are openly accessible, and because the outputs follow the ISIMIP framework, they can be combined with other Earth system datasets to study how changing groundwater affects ecosystems, food production, and society. In a world where the United Nations has warned of an era of global water bankruptcy, a kilometer-scale, globally consistent view of where water tables are falling and rising may prove one of the most consequential datasets yet produced for planning a sustainable water future.

Subject of Research: Global hyper-resolution modeling of historical and future groundwater dynamics at approximately 1 km resolution

Article Title: Global hyper-resolution modeling of historical and future groundwater dynamics

Article References: van Jaarsveld, B., Wanders, N., Otoo, N. G., Sutanudjaja, E. H., Verkaik, J., Zamrsky, D., & Bierkens, M. F. P. (2026). Global hyper-resolution modeling of historical and future groundwater dynamics. Earth System Dynamics, 17(5), 1201-1236. https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-17-1201-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/esd-17-1201-2026

Keywords: groundwater, hyper-resolution modeling, GLOBGM, water table depth, climate change, groundwater depletion, MODFLOW, ISIMIP, machine learning bias correction, GRACE satellite, SSP-RCP scenarios, water resources management