Long term monitoring of rainwater harvesting tanks: Is multi-years management possible in crystalline South Indian aquifers?

In semi-arid regions as in India, where agriculture relies on groundwater abstraction, increase of water resources availability through managed aquifer recharge (MAR) or rainwater harvesting (RWH) is often perceived as a major solution. Studies on these structures' efficiency exists but despite the interest, limited information is available on the temporal variation of their replenishment. In a monsoon driven climate, the inter-annual variations are crucial to assess the potential of water storage and multiyear management especially for these structures. Here, we aim at developing a methodology to reconstruct water storage of RWH tanks to further improve our understanding on long term efficiency and multi-years drought management. To tackle this issue, long-term monitoring of a RWH tank located in Telangana in Southern India is achieved by a combination of field monitoring over 2 years (tanks surface and water levels) and a daily water balance compared to LANDSAT measurements of the tank area. The procedure allows reconstructing the tank filling dynamic over a 14-years period at a daily time step and show the extreme variability of the tank filling level. During this period, the yearly maximum tank volume ranges from 8650 to similar to 200 000 m(3). On the 14-years period, the tank reach its maximum capacity only once and, for 1/3 of the time, yearly maximum replenishment is below 15% of its capacity. The surface water availability remains limited in time since the tank dries-up annually, except for 2 years. However, water percolation to the aquifer is slightly enhanced for some years. During this monitoring period, very few extreme raining events (6) contribute for more than 50% of the collected volume. This observation highlights (1) the dependency of the structure to extreme storm events, (2) the limited capacity for a multi-year's management and (3) the farmers vulnerability to successive droughts.