Climate Detectives Projects 2022-2023
Project title: “Lack of water in Marchena: An emerging problem.”
Team: “Guerreros del planeta” (“Planet Warriors”)
IES “LÓPEZ DE ARENAS” Marchena Spain 33 Student’s age: 14-15 years old
“Drop in the reservoir and phreatic level of Marchena groundwater. Relationship between rainfall, the number of wells which have been built in recent decades and other uses.”
An increasing number of wells has been built lately, as a result the irrigated area has also risen considerably. To this must be added the recreational use of groundwater that is being extracted from the different aquifers in the town.
If we take into account that each year the rainfall is less frequent, the situation is traumatic, since it is not ruled out that, in the near future, if it does not rain, more drastic measures will be taken, such as, the feared restrictions and cuts in the drinking water supply.
In such a situation, we propose to study how the groundwater level of the aquifers has been affected and, in that way, we could highlight the factors that are causing it and the proposals that can be made to alleviate and even reverse the current situation.
For this, meteorological and geographical data and satellite images will be used.
The following conclusions have been obtained:
Marchena is in 50% of water scarcity, in 83% of water depletion, in 100% of the reference water stress, in 100% of remaining water availability, as well as, in a 67% probability of drought frequency, with respect to other Spanish localities.
The town’s water consumption has been growing as has the consumption of a meat company, dedicated to turkey’ products. In such a way, that the data of the locality with and without this company had to be separated, in order to carry out a somewhat more reasonable study. From this operation, a behavior more-in-line with the rest of the towns in the region that have been reducing consumption over the years is observed. Although, it is a somewhat irregular trend, because some years it goes down and others it goes up.
Consumption data per inhabitant and year had a decline over the past decade but as of 2018, the trend has changed and is now at 2009 levels.
Finally, dammed water data has been studied in the reservoirs that supply the town.
Since the 1960s, it has been seen that the suffered periods of drought have been spaced more or less by the same years, around 2.5 years, and they had the same duration, around 16 months. Although the drought that affected the period from 1992 to 1995 was somewhat more extensive and similar to the one between 1980 and 1984, for nearly four years. After this great drought, in 1999, there was a small one that lasted a few months and a new episode of drought did not occur again until the one that currently affects us and which began in 2021.
The charts and graphs made with the data obtained are available on the blog that this group has created and the access link is left below.
An awareness campaign has been developed. To this end, multimedia presentations and short videos have been created to promote the campaign.
The material can be seen on the blog created by the group for this project and the access link is left below.
Project link:
https://sites.google.com/lopezdearenas.net/guerrerosdelplaneta/inicio/detectives-clim%C3%A1ticos-a%C3%B1o-2
ENLACE-EVOLUCION-CLOROFILA-EN-RETORTILLO-.pdf
Projects are created by the teams and they take the full responsibility of the shared data.
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