Preliminary study regarding the long-term assessment of Wadi Araba's aquifer potential for sustainable development using the GMS model: a case study in an arid area, Egypt, eastern desert

ABSTRACT Response to future scenario development is essential for sustainable groundwater management. Groundwater models are created and utilized to better understand the behavior of aquifer flow systems. Thus, Groundwater Modeling System (GMS) was applied to establish a simulation for the future behavior of the aquifer. GMS was implemented in two suggested development areas, and hydrological simulations of the aquifer (three non-interacting layers) were performed for 108 proposed groundwater wells. The water yield and geophysical data of existing drilled wells alongside Wadi Araba were used to verify the simulation results. Three scenarios were applied from 2024 to 2074, which are intensive withdrawal from each well (3,250 m3 day−1), moderate withdrawal (1,750 m3 day−1), and low withdrawal (1,500 m3 day−1). Results indicated that the model's accuracy met the requirement, where R2 analysis showed a high relationship between observed and computed heads for each layer with 1.0, 0.9931, and 0.8904, respectively. For both development areas, under all scenarios, layer 1 is the best layer for long-term sustainable development, where the lowest annual drawdown is observed, compared with layers 2 and 3. The higher annual drawdown in layers 2 and 3 caused seawater intrusion after a few years of development, compared with layer 1.