105 Coastal Hydrogeology in an Age of Rising Seas (Posters)

As sea levels rise, understanding hydrogeology is crucial in coastal areas. Seawater intrusion can lead to loss of potable or agricultural water supplies, and water table rise due to increasing sea level can lead to increased flooding and affect infrastructure.

Monday, 20 October 2025
8:00 AM - 5:30 PM
HBGCC, Hall 1

Implications of seasonal and storm-induced shallow coastal groundwater dynamics on sewer resilience with sea-level rise

Paper number: 105-1
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:00 AM – 8:00 AM

Authors

Abstract

Groundwater water tables will rise with sea level through a complex network of buried infrastructure, especially in urban environments. Conceptually, urban settings redistribute natural water fluxes by reducing infiltration via impervious surfaces and refocusing the runoff to drainages or sewer systems. Underlying this controlled runoff mechanism is the assumption that such drainage systems have enough capacity to successfully reroute incoming water to a designated endpoint. We explore the role of groundwater infiltration into storm sewers and discharge into drainages over storm-specific and seasonal timescales separately using one-way coupled hydrodynamic surface water and groundwater flow models. In this preliminary work, we identify the portions of a sewer network with potential for groundwater infiltration for several sea level rise scenarios, and we quantify the partitioning of simulated groundwater discharge to coasts, drainages, and the sewer network. We also test the influence of the parameterization of the infiltration potential on network-wide conditions by varying drain conductances according to different sewer defect representations. Storm and sanitary sewers are important buried infrastructure that will incrementally or on an event-by-event basis receive growing groundwater infiltration with sea level rise. The slow pace of the groundwater response to sea-level rise will make monitoring or fixing this gradual failure difficult without quantitative forecasts to help guide the where and when.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 57, No. 6

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-412253

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