Evaluating time-lagged relationships between groundwater storage and river discharge using GRACE-based data: insights from the Potomac Basin Archives

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Evaluating time-lagged relationships between groundwater storage and river discharge using GRACE-based data: insights from the Potomac Basin

January 22, 2026

This paper was published in the Environmental Research Communications (7 075003)

This study evaluates the utility of a recently available GRACE-based groundwater drought index (GDI) in supporting regional water supply management, with application to the Potomac River Basin, in the U.S. Middle Atlantic region. As the primary drinking water source for the Washington Metropolitan Area (WMA), effective management of the Potomac River’s resources is critical, especially in the context of climate change, with the expected increase in severity and frequency of extreme events. Our analysis integrates 22 years of data, including GRACE-based groundwater storage (GWS) index estimates, river discharge (Q) measurements, and meteorological records, to investigate trends and predictive relationships between past GWS, as determined by the GRACE-based drought index, and streamflow. Seasonal Mann-Kendall trend analyses consistently identified severe declining trends in groundwater storage (GWS), as well as moderate declines in minimum streamflow and well water levels over the past 22 years. Granger Causality (GC) tests revealed significant time lags of 49 weeks to 22 months at weekly and monthly scales, respectively depending on a region’s hydrogeomorphic characteristics. Vector Autoregressive (VAR) Models and Forecast Error Variance Decomposition (FEVD) highlighted the variable contributions of precipitation and temperature to the GWS-Q relationship, revealing a strong autoregressive component of Q, but also reveal that GWS plays an important role, and this role increases with time. These findings underscore the interconnectedness of groundwater and surface water systems and the importance of integrated predictive models to enhance water management strategies. Incorporating GRACE-based seasonal groundwater forecasts into drought preparedness tools could bolster efforts to mitigate regional climate change impacts and improve the resilience of water resources in the Potomac River Basin. While practical use of native GRACE data has been challenging for local, small-scale applications, this study demonstrates the utility of the GRACE-based GDI in forecasting low flows and informing regional water resource management decisions during droughts.

DOI: 10.1088/2515-7620/ade36f

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Is Hot Drought a Risk in the US Mid-Atlantic? A Potomac Basin Case Study

January 22, 2026

This paper was published in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association (Volume 61, Issue 3, June 2025)

Interannual variability of streamflow will increase under a future climate, but at the regional scale, there is uncertainty regarding changes in drought severity, and in particular, changes in extreme hydrological drought that could necessitate new water supply infrastructure. This is due to the wide range of regional projections for precipitation and the challenge of estimating statistics in a nonstationary climate. We assess changes in annual streamflow in the Potomac River Basin using a nonparametric approach based on a climate response function and the K-nearest neighbor method, which is relied on to construct time series of sufficient length to compute extreme quantile values. Our results indicate that future Potomac River flows will be impacted by “hot drought”, that is, increasing drought severity caused by rising temperatures coupled with natural variability in precipitation. Average precipitation is projected to increase in the Potomac basin by 9%–12% in the period 2039–2069 and by 11%–16% by 2070–2099. Average streamflow increases more modestly, by 4%–7% in 2039–2069 and by 2 to 9% in 2070–2099, whereas annual flows in an extreme drought year decrease by 3 to 26% in 2039–2069 and by 2%–49% in 2070–2099, assuming a medium sensitivity of flow to temperature. Our approach can provide multi-model consensus inputs for water supply planning models to support decision-making regarding new infrastructure.

DOI number: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1752-1688.70031

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2025 Washington Metropolitan Area Water Supply Study: Demand and Resource Availability Forecast for the Year 2050

December 5, 2025

This is the eighth in a series of studies by the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB) Section for Cooperative Water Supply Operations on the Potomac (CO-OP) to evaluate the adequacy of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area (WMA) water supplies to meet expected water demands over the coming decades. The WMA has a unique, cooperative water supply system that was established more than 40 years ago by a set of regional agreements signed by the Fairfax County Water Authority (Fairfax Water), the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC Water), the Washington Aqueduct Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Washington Aqueduct), the District of Columbia, and CO-OP. One of the requirements of the regional agreements is that every five years, such an evaluation be conducted. The current study’s planning horizon is 2050. It provides decision-makers with the following:

  • Forecasts of water demands for the WMA, taking into account projected demographic and societal changes that may affect future water use
  • Forecasts of water availability, considering the potential impact of changes in meteorological conditions and upstream consumptive use of water on system resources
  • An evaluation of the ability of existing and planned system resources to meet the forecasted demands

A fact sheet is available with a summary of the report’s findings >>>

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2023 CO-OP Drought Operations

November 22, 2024

The Washington, DC, metropolitan area experienced unusually dry conditions in the summer and fall of 2023, and flows in the Potomac River fell to levels requiring the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB) Section for Cooperative Water Supply Operations on the Potomac (CO-OP) to conduct drought response activities in support of the major regional water suppliers: Fairfax Water, Loudoun Water, WSSC Water, and the Washington Aqueduct, a Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This report provides a brief summary of these activities and of related issues and discussions that arose. It also documents the take-aways of a Post-Drought Operations Review meeting that took place on November 3, 2023, and a subsequent meeting of the CO-OP Operations Committee on November 17.

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Quantifying groundwater storage dynamics in the Chesapeake Bay watershed (USA) using a large-scale integrated hydrologic model with detailed three-dimensional subsurface representation

June 29, 2023

Expanding on current efforts to evaluate the role of groundwater dynamics in managing and restoring Chesapeake Bay (USA), the integrated hydrologic model ParFlow-CLM was applied to a 374,976-km2 area encompassing the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The model included a representation of surface water, groundwater and land-surface energy fluxes with spatially variable atmospheric forcing at an hourly time step. The study tackled issues of data availability, access, assembly, and synthesis for estimating hydrogeologic properties in the context of the development of a large-scale model. Hydrogeologic properties from literature and other sources were assembled, processed, and synthesized to derive a conceptual hydrogeologic model consisting of 29 hydrofacies and a three-dimensional hydraulic conductivity field. Evaluation of the ParFlow-CLM model output showed that the constructed model captured seasonal and spatial variability in subsurface storage, surface storage and surface runoff, and produced water-table depths consistent with the topography, meteorological forcing, and hydrogeology. Comparison with well data from the US Geological Survey showed good agreement of model output with observed hydraulic heads for most of the data. Modeled terrestrial water storage changes compared well with GRACE satellite data with a root mean square error of 2.3 cm. Model results showed the dominant contribution of subsurface storage changes (90%) to terrestrial water storage changes in the region.

The publication is available on Springer Nature.

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2020 Washington Metropolitan Area Drought Exercise

March 4, 2021

This report describes activities conducted during the 2020 drought exercise. The exercise was virtual, and took place on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, November 16-18, from 7:30 AM to 4:00 PM.
Communications during the exercise were via telephone, email, and Microsoft Teams Meeting, and all
operations were “simulated.” Twice daily email reports were sent out to stakeholders reporting on current flow and demand conditions and on simulated operations. The exercise included two special events:

  • An actual test release from Little Seneca Reservoir, which was conducted over an approximately
    12-hour period, beginning at 10:00 AM on Tuesday, November 17.
  • A webinar by Hazen & Sawyer on the use of the Potomac OASIS model to provide probabilistic
    information on future streamflows and reservoir storage levels. A PDF of the webinar on forecast informed reservoir operations is available.

Learn more about previous drought exercises and the ICPRB’s Section for Cooperative Water Supply Operations on the Potomac on the Drought Monitoring and Operations page.

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2020 Washington Metropolitan Area Water Supply Reliability Study: Demand and Resource Availability Forecast for the Year 2050

December 4, 2020

Every five years since 1990, ICPRB’s Section for Cooperative Water Supply Operations on the Potomac (CO-OP) has conducted a water demand and resource availability forecast for the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. These studies assess whether or not the current water supply system will be able to meet the needs of the region 20 or more years in the future.

Learn more about these reports on the CO-OP Long-Term Planning page.

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