Estimation of permafrost thawing rates in a sub-arctic catchment using recession flow analysis

Lyon, Steve W.; Destouni, Georgia; Giesler, Reiner; Humborg, Christoph; Mörth, Magnus; Seibert, Jan; Karlsson, Jan; Troch, P. A.

doi:10.5194/hess-13-595-2009

Cited by 108 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Brutsaert (2008Brutsaert ( , 2010 used time series of annual low-flow discharge for catchments in Illinois and the eastern USA to detect a (mostly increasing) trend in groundwater storage within the upstream riparian aquifers. Lyon et al (2009) applied similar methods, combined with the linearized Boussinesq equation, to a streamflow record of a subarctic catchment to determine temporal trends in a, attributed to a trend in aquifer thickness D, taken as a proxy of effective depth to permafrost. The resulting permafrost thawing rate was in agreement with direct observations.…”

Section: Physical Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Streamflow recession patterns can help unravel the role of climate and humans in landscape co-evolution

Bogaart

Velde²,

Lyon

et al. 2016

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Traditionally, long-term predictions of river discharges and their extremes include constant relationships between landscape properties and model parameters. However, due to the co-evolution of many landscape properties more sophisticated methods are necessary to quantify future landscape-hydrological model relationships. As a first step towards such an approach we use the Brutsaert and Nieber (1977) analysis method to characterize streamflow recession behaviour of ≈ 200 Swedish catchments within the context of global change and landscape co-evolution. Results suggest that the Brutsaert-Nieber parameters are strongly linked to the climate, soil, land use, and their interdependencies. Many catchments show a trend towards more non-linear behaviour, meaning not only faster initial recession but also slower recession towards base flow. This trend has been found to be independent from climate change. Instead, we suggest that land cover change, both natural (restoration of natural soil profiles in forested areas) and anthropogenic (reforestation and optimized water management), is probably responsible. Both change types are characterised by system adaptation and change, towards more optimal ecohydrological conditions, suggesting landscape co-evolution is at play. Given the observed magnitudes of recession changes during the past 50 years, predictions of future river discharge critically need to include the effects of landscape co-evolution. The interconnections between the controls of land cover and climate on river recession behaviour, as we have quantified in this paper, provide first-order handles to do so.

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Section: Physical Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Streamflow recession patterns can help unravel the role of climate and humans in landscape co-evolution

Bogaart

Velde²,

Lyon

et al. 2016

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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“…For instance, although there are indications of increased losses of DOC (Frey and Smith, 2005) from northern latitude ecosystems, changes in hydrological flow pathways may also alter the proportion between organic and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) export (Lyon et al, 2010a;Jantze et al, 2013). Loss of permafrost areas due to degradation Klaminder et al, 2008) or a deepening of the active layer may increase the importance of subsurface flow pathways (Striegl et al, 2005;Walvoord and Striegl, 2007;Lyon et al, 2009Lyon et al, , 2010b. Striegl et al (2005) found, for instance, that the summer DOC export decreased in the Yukon River when comparing 1978-1980 to 2001-2003.…”

Section: R Giesler Et Al: Catchment-scale Dissolved Carbon Concentrmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are a number of arguments favoring that the observed changes are related to changes in water flow pathways such as those seen in time from the long-term monitoring. For instance, recession flow analysis based on long-term flow records from stream 6 suggests that there has been an increase in the effective aquifer depth in the catchment that could be related to permafrost thaw (Lyon et al, 2009), while analyses of the annual discharges matching the period considered here show decreases in annual total discharge (Jantze et al, 2013). Furthermore, when considering the long-term annual DOC and DIC loads, Jantze et al (2013) reported no significant trends in the total annual mass flux of either DIC or DOC over the periods considered but a significant decreasing trend in total annual discharge for stream 6.…”

Section: The Role Of Shifting Flow Pathways For Dic and Doc Concentramentioning

confidence: 99%

Catchment-scale dissolved carbon concentrations and export estimates across six subarctic streams in northern Sweden

et al. 2014

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Abstract. Climatic change is currently enhancing permafrost thawing and the flow of water through the landscape in subarctic and arctic catchments, with major consequences for the carbon export to aquatic ecosystems. We studied stream water carbon export in several tundra-dominated catchments in northern Sweden. There were clear seasonal differences in both dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) concentrations. The highest DOC concentrations occurred during the spring freshet while the highest DIC concentrations were always observed during winter baseflow conditions for the six catchments considered in this study. Long-term trends for the period 1982 to 2010 for one of the streams showed that DIC concentrations has increased by 9 % during the 28 yr of measurement while no clear trend was found for DOC. Similar increasing trends were also found for conductivity, Ca and Mg. When trends were discretized into individual months, we found a significant linear increase in DIC concentrations with time for September, November and December. In these subarctic catchments, the annual mass of C exported as DIC was in the same order of magnitude as DOC; the average proportion of DIC to the total dissolved C exported was 61 % for the six streams. Furthermore, there was a direct relationship between total runoff and annual dissolved carbon fluxes for these six catchments. These relationships were more prevalent for annual DIC exports than annual DOC exports in this region. Our results also highlight that both DOC and DIC can be important in highlatitude ecosystems. This is particularly relevant in environments where thawing permafrost and changes to subsurface ice due to global warming can influence stream water fluxes of C. The large proportion of stream water DIC flux also has implications on regional C budgets and needs to be considered in order to understand climate-induced feedback mechanisms across the landscape.

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“…Apart from the variety of adaptations of the original method by Brutsaert and Nieber (1977), these different RAMs have also been applied to various catchment types with different catchment areas and different physiographic, geological, and climatic characteristics including in humid (Troch et al, 1993), in tropical (Peña-Arancibia et al, 2010), in semi-arid (Mendoza et al, 2003;Ajami et al, 2011) and sub-artic (Lyon et al, 2009) regions. Furthermore methods have been applied to catchments with different land use characteristics such as forested catchments (Parlange et al, 2001), deforested catchments (Malvicini et al, 2005), mountainous catchments (Zecharias and Brutsaert, 1988a;Teuling et al, 2010) and also explicitly to small catchments (Krakauer and Temimi, 2011) and to a lowland plain with a deep aquifer .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore methods have been applied to catchments with different land use characteristics such as forested catchments (Parlange et al, 2001), deforested catchments (Malvicini et al, 2005), mountainous catchments (Zecharias and Brutsaert, 1988a;Teuling et al, 2010) and also explicitly to small catchments (Krakauer and Temimi, 2011) and to a lowland plain with a deep aquifer . The variety of applicability can also be seen in studies which estimated hydraulic conductivity (Troch et al, 1993), mountain block recharge (Ajami et al, 2011), catchment-scale evapotranspiration (Szilagyi et al, 2007;Palmroth et al, 2010) or permafrost thawing rates (Lyon et al, 2009). Other authors have detected trends in groundwater storage (Brutsaert and Sugita, 2008) or quantified human influences on low flows (Wang and Cai, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are streamflow recession characteristics really characteristic?

Stoelzle

Stahl

Weiler

2013

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

108

134

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Abstract. Streamflow recession has been investigated by a variety of methods, often involving the fit of a model to empirical recession plots to parameterize a non-linear storageoutflow relationship based on the dQ/dt-Q method. Such recession analysis methods (RAMs) are used to estimate hydraulic conductivity, storage capacity, or aquifer thickness and to model streamflow recession curves for regionalization and prediction at the catchment scale. Numerous RAMs have been published, but little is known about how comparably the resulting recession models distinguish characteristic catchment behavior. In this study we combined three established recession extraction methods with three different parameter-fitting methods to the power-law storage-outflow model to compare the range of recession characteristics that result from the application of these different RAMs. Resulting recession characteristics including recession time and corresponding storage depletion were evaluated for 20 mesoscale catchments in Germany. We found plausible ranges for model parameterization; however, calculated recession characteristics varied over two orders of magnitude. While recession characteristics of the 20 catchments derived with the different methods correlate strongly, particularly for the RAMs that use the same extraction method, not all rank the catchments consistently, and the differences among some of the methods are larger than among the catchments. To elucidate this variability we discuss the ambiguous roles of recession extraction procedures and the parameterization of the storage-outflow model and the limitations of the presented recession plots. The results suggest strong limitations to the comparability of recession characteristics derived with different methods, not only in the model parameters but also in the relative characterization of different catchments. A multiple-methods approach to investigating streamflow recession characteristics should be considered for applications whenever possible.

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Estimation of permafrost thawing rates in a sub-arctic catchment using recession flow analysis

Cited by 108 publications

References 45 publications

Streamflow recession patterns can help unravel the role of climate and humans in landscape co-evolution

Streamflow recession patterns can help unravel the role of climate and humans in landscape co-evolution

Catchment-scale dissolved carbon concentrations and export estimates across six subarctic streams in northern Sweden

Are streamflow recession characteristics really characteristic?

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