5.2 Impact of anthropogenic groundwater exploitation on regional
climates
The global water demand is rapidly increasing as a result of economic
development and population growth (Rodell and Famiglietti 2002; Rodell
et al. 2009; Alvarez et al. 2012; Shi et al. 2013; Devic et al. 2014).
Groundwater is widely used to supplement human demands for freshwater
due to its convenience of extraction and good quality. The continuous
over extraction of groundwater resources for consumption not only
reduces groundwater table levels, but also changes the regional, and
even global, environment and climate (Pokhrel et al. 2012b; Chen and Hu
2004). Implementation of anthropogenic groundwater exploitation in the
CAS-FGOALS model was done by using a groundwater exploitation extraction
forcing data set, the details of which can be found in the work of Wang
et al. (2020). Figure 10 shows the simulated latent heat flux with and
without anthropogenic groundwater exploitation (EXP and CTR,
respectively). As seen in the figure, addition of the anthropogenic
groundwater exploitation has caused the significant latent heat flux to
increase (5–20 W∙m-2) in three representative over
extraction regions of North India, North China, and the western coast
and central regions of the USA. According to Dirmeyer et al. (2013),
evapotranspiration in these three places was restricted by water
availability more than in other regions. Thus, when a greater supply of
water was available, more evaporation latent heat occurred. This argued
for the explicit representation of anthropogenic groundwater
exploitation within climate models.