Unraveling Groundwater Stress: A Model Generalizable Across Space and Time Reveals Co-Declining Water Tables and Recharge Across Bangladesh

Abstract

Is Bangladesh replenishing the groundwater it depends on? Answering this question remains difficult in Bangladesh and worldwide because sparse in-situ measurements limit observational capabilities, while existing machine-learning approaches struggle to generalize across time and space. To address this bottleneck, we develop a Teacher-Student framework in which a Teacher accurately learns from sparse annual in-situ minimum (R2 = 0.86) and maximum (R2 = 0.96) depth observations to generate dense spatial patterns, and a Student transfers these patterns from time-varying 25-km GLDAS groundwater storage to high-resolution (2-km) depth maps using location-specific features. The Student achieves R2 = 0.93 over 2003-2022 and generalizes across unseen years (Leave-One-Year-Out R2 = 0.93) and locations (Leave-One-District-Out R2 = 0.70), enabling reconstruction without contemporary in-situ measurements. The reconstruction reveals widespread water-table deepening and a national decline in groundwater recharge of 1.10 mm/yr (p < 0.001). Autocorrelation-corrected analysis identifies statistically significant recharge declines across 55.6% of Bangladesh, compared with significant increases across only 4.9%. This imbalance suggests that pumping-induced recharge enhancement, as proposed by the Bengal Water Machine hypothesis, remains localized rather than widespread across Bangladesh. Together, these findings reveal widespread weakening of groundwater replenishment and provide a scalable framework for monitoring groundwater dynamics in data-sparse aquifers globally.