Addressing Time in Communicating Groundwater Science

One of the challenges facing groundwater hydrologists is to communicate the highly variable temporal characteristics of groundwater systems and their responses to human and natural stresses.  Just as hydraulic conductivity spans many orders of magnitude, temporal scales range from real-time to many millennia. This presentation presents a travelogue through different time scales of interest to hydrogeologists from diurnal variations in groundwater responses, annual responses to droughts, long-term climate change, decadal-to-millennial scale responses to pumping, residual effects of glacial periods, and forecasts for nuclear waste disposal. These time scales are related back to groundwater governance.