Reconstruction of paleoclimate and estimation of groundwater recharge during the Holocene on the Arabian Peninsula

On the Arabian Peninsula, due to lack of surface water and increased water consumption, water supply is highly dependent on groundwater, mostly fossil water. Since most of this fossil groundwater is considered as non-renewable, it’s necessary to correctly approximate the amount of available water stored in the aquifer systems. Parameter optimization using inverse modeling can help in this regard. Therefore, there has been an endeavor to build a groundwater model of millennia-scale. The main obstacle of the model is the inevitable lack of observation data, and thus proxy data has been used for reconstructing paleo-environment. Especially, despite its importance in the model, groundwater recharge has been considered difficult to estimate, due to its nature of non-linearity and no standardized methods to evaluate the accuracy of an estimate. Also, in recent decades, relevant studies were reinvigorated due to the uprising archeological importance of the region (the Neolithic migration of hominin) and better accessibility to remote areas in Saudi Arabia. Thus, researches on the paleo-environment on the Arabian Peninsula during the Holocene has been undergoing great revisions.

In this study, paleoclimate from the early Holocene to the present was reconstructed using proxy data and the CMIP6-PMIP4 paleoclimate model with effort to validate using current understanding on paleo-environment on the Arabian Peninsula. Based on this, the amount of recharge from precipitation was estimated along the temporal evolution.