Estimation of actual irrigation amount and its impact on groundwater depletion: A case study in the Hebei Plain, China

Abstract Irrigation water is an important but missing hydrological cycle component in the region with intensive agricultural irrigation, due to the lack of monitoring facilities. The Hebei Plain, suffering the most severe groundwater depletion in China for agriculture production, provides an ideal background to study historical agricultural water consumption and its dependence on groundwater exploitation. This paper investigated the method of retrieving the spatial-temporal irrigation amount from multiple data sets of different sources and different scales. Comprehensive data including 21 years of satellite-based data, ground-based data, and four years of tracer experiment data are synthesized to implement the soil water balance. We proposed a modified soil water balance framework by relying on as much as possible of easily available data. Our results showed that the multi-mean annual irrigation amount in the Hebei Plain is 317 mm, and mean irrigation-to-evapotranspiration ratio reaches 50.8% in recent two decades. Moreover, the precipitation distribution, plant structure, and agricultural intensity result in significantly spatiotemporal variation in irrigation and irrigation-to-evapotranspiration ratio, while however has not been addressed by previous studies. Deep percolation, ignored by many soil water balance models, was shown to be unneglectable. The estimated actual irrigation amount, together with groundwater level data, are valuable to obtain a further understanding on groundwater depletion. The diverse groundwater depletion situation in the Hebei Plain indicated the importance of recognizing the groundwater utilization patterns at a smaller scale in the regional-scale groundwater resources management. This work showed the feasibility of estimating the irrigation amount using simultaneously different types of data and revealed the spatiotemporal characteristics of agriculture water consumption and associated groundwater depletion in the Hebei Plain.