Summarizing the impacts of future potential global change scenarios on seawater intrusion at the aquifer scale

Climate change affects rainfall and temperature producing a breakdown in the water balance and a variation in the dynamic of freshwater–seawater in coastal areas, exacerbating seawater intrusion (SWI) problems. The target of this paper is to propose a method to assess and analyze impacts of future global change (GC) scenarios on SWI at the aquifer scale in a coastal area. Some adaptation measures have been integrated in the definition of future GC scenarios incorporating complementary resources within the system in accordance with urban development planning. The proposed methodology summarizes the impacts of potential GC scenarios in terms of SWI status and vulnerability at the aquifer scale through steady pictures (maps and conceptual 2D cross sections for specific dates or statistics of a period) and time series for lumped indices. It is applied to the Plana de Oropesa-Torreblanca aquifer. The results summarize the influence of GC scenarios in the global status and vulnerability to SWI under some management scenarios. These GC scenarios would produce higher variability of SWI status and vulnerability.