A New Technique for Resolving Benthic Solute Fluxes: Evaluation of Conditional Sampling Using Aquatic Relaxed Eddy Accumulation

Abstract

Solute exchange between the sediment and the water column strongly influences water quality in aquatic ecosystems. Among the techniques available for in situ observation, only aquatic eddy covariance (AEC) can resolve the hourly dynamics of benthic fluxes, but only for few substances like oxygen. In micrometeorology, relaxed eddy accumulation (REA), a technique based on high‐frequency sampling conditioned by current direction, overcomes this limitation. We developed a portable prototype instrumentation platform to transfer REA to the sediment‐water interface of shallow aquatic ecosystems. In order to evaluate the sampling system, we configured the prototype for measuring oxygen fluxes and comparing them to simultaneous AEC measurements. In a river and two artificial lakes, at depths 1–3 m and 0.2 m above the sediment, we measured 15 oxygen flux pairs in fully developed turbulence during 8–15 min periods, ranging from −150 to 50 mmol m−2 day−1. The good agreement between REA and AEC fluxes (R2 = 0.94) shows the reliability of the conditional sampling system. REA represents a promising technique for exploring the sediment contribution to biogeochemical cycles in aquatic ecosystems.