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The sustainability of irrigated agriculture in many arid and semiarid areas of the world is at risk because of a combination of several interrelated factors, including lack of fresh water, lack of drainage, the presence of high water tables, and salinization of soil and groundwater resources. Nowhere in the United States are these issues more apparent than in the San Joaquin Valley of California. A solid understanding of salinization processes at regional spatial and decadal time scales is required to evaluate the sustainability of irrigated agriculture. A hydro-salinity model was developed to integrate subsurface hydrology with reactive salt transport for a 1,400-km² study area in the San Joaquin Valley. The model was used to reconstruct historical changes in salt storage by irrigated agriculture over the past 60 years. We show that patterns in soil and groundwater salinity were caused by spatial variations in soil hydrology, the change from local groundwater to snowmelt water as the main irrigation water supply, and by occasional droughts. Gypsum dissolution was a critical component of the regional salt balance. Although results show that the total salt input and output were about equal for the past 20 years, the model also predicts salinization of the deeper aquifers, thereby questioning the sustainability of irrigated agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A diverse group of problems requires quantification of the entire hydrologic cycle by the integrated simulation of water flow in the surface and subsurface regimes. In a transient integrated simulation of the water cycle, the time step size is a key factor in controlling the solution accuracy and the simulation efficiency for a given spatial discretization. In general, if the time step size is sufficiently small, the resulting solution becomes more accurate but with higher computational cost. Thus, to maintain an acceptable level of solution accuracy in the entire simulation domain, the time step size is restricted by the relatively rapid responses in the surface flow regime. As the relatively rapid responses are typically limited to a small portion of the surface domain compared with the groundwater system, a large portion of the domain tends to be temporally overdiscretized. The implicit subtime stepping approach described here can apply smaller subtime steps only to the subdomain where the accuracy requirements are needed. In this work, generalized formulations for implicit subtime stepping in the numerical solution of the nonlinear coupled surface-subsurface equations were derived and implemented into the integrated model HydroGeoSphere. Application to several problems showed that implicit subtime stepping can significantly improve the simulation efficiency with minimal loss in accuracy. The methodology was successfully applied to enhance the computational efficiency of an integrated flow simulation in the San Joaquin Valley, California, where the characteristic response time near surface drainage streams is orders of magnitude shorter than in the groundwater regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]