Trends in Austrian groundwater – Climate or human impact?

•Austrian groundwater levels show a falling trend towards 1980 followed by a rise.•Groundwater shows similar behavior, even in geographically different locations.•Groundwater levels fit the trends in water use.•Precipitation and stream stages exhibit trends different from groundwater before 1980. Austria. Using publicly available data for the main components of the hydrological cycle we use standardization to calculate countrywide and regional averages of groundwater levels, stream stages and precipitation. These averages get analyzed for the occurrence of trends, compared with each other and the Austrian water use over time. It is shown that groundwater levels trend downwards until the 1980s, from whereon they recover. Precipitation follows this track, but the downward trend is much less severe. River stages lack data for the downward trending period, but follow the upward trend too. The trend in groundwater is a reverse of the trends observed in water use and we hypothesize that the discrepancy between average precipitation and average groundwater pre 1980s could be caused by the increasing water use in this period, especially since Austrias water demands are mostly sourced from groundwater.