EAGER: Groundwater Resilience Assessment through iNtegrated Data Exploration for Ukraine (GRANDE-U)

The project aims to develop solutions to the persistent problem of accurately assessing groundwater, which is the main source of drinking water in many regions, including transboundary areas. Our hypothesis is that integrating hydrogeologic models with satellite and ground-based data to increase the resolution of remote sensing information will allow us to create highly detailed predictions of changes in GW storage and flows across borders. The challenge is that satellite gravity data from GRACE-FO have coarse spatial and temporal resolution and often inaccurate to separate the groundwater signal from other water balance components such as precipitation, runoff, evapotranspiration, snow storage etc. and may limit its utility for analysis of aquifer depletion and resilience at finer scales. The highest quality data typically comes from expensive, sparsely distributed in-situ monitoring. The project combines comprehensive AI-assisted modeling of surface water and groundwater interactions to assess groundwater storage, flows, and aquifer resilience under different scenarios, to support decision-making given incomplete, imprecise, and differently structured in-situ data. There are partners from six countries: the United States, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Estonian partners (University of Tartu and Geological Survey of Estonia) are mainly involved with collection of observational data and provide hydrogeological modelling expertise that are needed for ground truthing of developed models, but contribute also to other tasks. The project results will be especially useful to Ukraine, where limitations of the ground observation network require more efficient assessment techniques based on remote sensing