Potential impacts of climate change on groundwater level through hybrid soft-computing methods: a case study—Shabestar Plain, Iran

Groundwater aquifers have always been confronted with significant challenges around the world such as climate change, over-extraction, pollution by wastewaters, and saltwater intrusion in coastal areas. Prediction of groundwater level under the effects of climate change is more important in water resource management. This study has therefore been evaluated the effects of two climate parameters (i.e., precipitation and temperature) in groundwater level for the Shabestar Plain, Iran. For this end, four models from General Circulation Models (GCM) were then used to evaluate future climate change scenarios of the Representative Concentration Pathway (i.e., RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP8.5). In the next phase, to reduce the spatial complexity of observation wells, clustering analysis was used. In case of groundwater level modeling, time series in the base period, Least Square Support Vector Machine (LSSVM), Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), and Nonlinear Autoregressive Network with Exogenous inputs (NARX) were also used. To improve the prediction accuracy, time series preprocessing made by wavelet-based de-noising approach was used. Analysis of the results illustrates an increase in temperature and a decrease in precipitation for study region in the future period times. The results also reveal that hybrid techniques of the wavelet-NARX give best results in comparison with the other models. A simulation result illustrates that the groundwater level declines in RCP2.6, 4.5, and 8.5, which gives average levels of 0.61, 0.81, and 1.53 m, respectively, for the future period years (i.e., 2020–2024). These results would lead to continuous groundwater depletion. These findings emphasize the necessity of the importance of extraction policies in water resource management.