Groundwater Storage in High Alpine Catchments and Its Contribution to Streamflow

Cochand, Marion; Christe, P.; Ornstein, P.; Hunkeler, Daniel

doi:10.1029/2018wr022989

Cited by 70 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 68 publications

(92 reference statements)

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“…This groundwater storage is much less than the peak snowpack storage (500-640 mm snow water equivalent) but is important when compared to the average fall and winter baseflow which is typically less than 0.5 mm/d. Cochand et al (2019) employed a similar water balance approach to Hood and Hayashi (2015) but found a larger change in groundwater storage during the snowmelt period of 300 mm or 45% of the pre-melt snow water equivalent in the Valais Alps of Switzerland. Accordingly, Cochand et al's minimum stream baseflow was higher than Hood and Hayashi's at 0.9 mm/d indicative of more groundwater storage.…”

Section: Water Balance Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A review of groundwater in high mountain environments

2020

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Mountain water resources are of particular importance for downstream populations but are threatened by decreasing water storage in snowpack and glaciers. Groundwater contribution to mountain streamflow, once assumed to be relatively small, is now understood to represent an important water source to streams. This review presents an overview of research on groundwater in high mountain environments (As classified by Meybeck et al. (2001) as very high, high, and mid-altitude mountains). Coarse geomorphic units, like talus, alluvium, and moraines, are important stores and conduits for high mountain groundwater. Bedrock aquifers contribute to catchment streamflow through shallow, weathered bedrock but also to higher order streams and central valley aquifers through deep fracture flow and mountain-block recharge. Tracer and water balance studies have shown that groundwater contributes substantially to streamflow in many high mountain catchments, particularly during lowflow periods. The percentage of streamflow attributable to groundwater varies greatly through time and between watersheds depending on the geology, topography, climate, and spatial scale. Recharge to high mountain aquifers is spatially variable and comes from a combination of infiltration from rain, snowmelt, and glacier melt, as well as concentrated recharge beneath losing streams, or through fractures and swallow holes. Recent advances suggest that high mountain groundwater may provide some resilience-at least temporarily-to climate-driven glacier and snowpack recession. A paucity of field data and the heterogeneity of alpine landscapes remain important challenges, but new data sources, tracers, and modeling methods continue to expand our understanding of high mountain groundwater flow.

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Section: Water Balance Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A review of groundwater in high mountain environments

2020

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“…The concept of how catchments retain water is becoming almost equally recognized as how catchments release water [4][5][6][7]. However, very recent studies mentioned the formerly unrecognized subsurface storage potential of mountain catchments [4,8,9], i.e., water is not only temporarily stored as snow and ice, but also in the soil, fractured bedrock, moraines, talus, alluvium, alluvial fans, permafrost, rock glaciers and rock slides [4,[10][11][12][13]. This water contributes to streamflow by shallow to deep flow paths [3,14], both in periods with rain, snowmelt and ice melt input and in periods without water input to the catchment (i.e., when the catchment is in a frozen state [8]), and hence is an important contributor to streamflow.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Teflon Basin’ or Not? A High-Elevation Catchment Transit Time Modeling Approach

et al. 2019

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We determined the streamflow transit time and the subsurface water storage volume in the glacierized high-elevation catchment of the Rofenache (Oetztal Alps, Austria) with the lumped parameter transit time model TRANSEP. Therefore we enhanced the surface energy-balance model ESCIMO to simulate the ice melt, snowmelt and rain input to the catchment and associated δ18O values for 100 m elevation bands. We then optimized TRANSEP with streamflow volume and δ18O for a four-year period with input data from the modified version of ESCIMO at a daily resolution. The median of the 100 best TRANSEP runs revealed a catchment mean transit time of 9.5 years and a mobile storage of 13,846 mm. The interquartile ranges of the best 100 runs were large for both, the mean transit time (8.2–10.5 years) and the mobile storage (11,975–15,382 mm). The young water fraction estimated with the sinusoidal amplitude ratio of input and output δ18O values and delayed input of snow and ice melt was 47%. Our results indicate that streamflow is dominated by the release of water younger than 56 days. However, tracers also revealed a large water volume in the subsurface with a long transit time resulting to a strongly delayed exchange with streamflow and hence also to a certain portion of relatively old water: The median of the best 100 TRANSEP runs for streamflow fraction older than five years is 28%.

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“…We argue that the collection of extensive subsurface structural data, beyond the drilling of a few boreholes, should be an important part of hillslope and catchment characterization. Rapid advances and improvements in hydrogeophysical methods (Binley et al, 2015) such as direct current resistivity, ground penetrating radar, and electromagnetic surveys (including airborne)( e.g., Vittecoq et al, 2019) provide unprecedented opportunities to improve the field characterization of groundwater storage mechanisms in catchments (e.g., Cochand et al, 2019;Staudinger et al, 2017) and to build the multiscale data sets (e.g., Pelletier et al, 2016;Shangguan et al, 2017;Xu & Liu, 2017) needed to develop mathematically and physically sound methodologies (e.g., Heimsath et al, 1997;Nicótina et al, 2011;Pelletier, 2013) for upscaling local observations, such as bedrock information from borehole data.…”

Section: Beyond the Hillslope Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

Fill and Spill Hillslope Runoff Representation With a Richards Equation‐Based Model

Camporese

Paniconi

Putti

et al. 2019

Water Resources Research

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Integrated surface‐subsurface hydrological models (ISSHMs) are well established numerical tools to investigate water flow and contaminant transport processes over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. However, their ability to correctly reproduce the response of hydrological systems to natural and anthropogenic forcing depends largely on the accuracy of model parameterization, including the level of detail in the representation of the bedrock. This latter is typically incorporated in some way via the bottom boundary of the model domain. Issues of bedrock topography, variable soil depth, and the resulting hillslope storage distribution representation in ISSHMs are vitally important but to date have received little attention. A standard treatment of the bottom boundary, especially in large catchment and continental scale applications, is to model it as a flat or inclined (e.g., parallel to the surface) impermeable base (sometimes with some simple leakage term). This approach does not allow the model to correctly reproduce bedrock‐controlled threshold responses such as the fill and spill process, as observed across many hillslope and catchment scale field studies. It is still unclear whether Richards equation‐based numerical models are actually able to generate such responses. Here we use a Richards equation‐based model (CATHY) to simulate internal transient subsurface stormflow dynamics observed at the well‐characterized Panola experimental hillslope in Georgia (USA). Soil and bedrock properties were calibrated starting from values reported in previous studies at the site. Our simulation results show that the model was able to reproduce threshold mechanisms, which in turn affected both the integrated and distributed hydrologic responses of the Panola hillslope. We then developed a set of virtual experiments with modified boundary conditions and base topography at the soil‐bedrock interface to explore the bedrock boundary control on transient groundwater flow patterns. Our results show that accurate representation of the lower boundary is crucial for ISSHM simulations of hillslope‐scale storm runoff and for connectivity of transient groundwater. We summarize our findings with the development of a new bedrock topographic wetness index that takes into account the unsaturated infiltration dynamics. The index is able to help represent the spatial variability of water table response over the bedrock surface compared to standard surface topography‐based indices. This new index may be useful in larger‐scale ISSHM applications where an exact bedrock topography representation is not feasible or possible.

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Groundwater Storage in High Alpine Catchments and Its Contribution to Streamflow

Cited by 70 publications

References 68 publications

A review of groundwater in high mountain environments

A review of groundwater in high mountain environments

‘Teflon Basin’ or Not? A High-Elevation Catchment Transit Time Modeling Approach

Fill and Spill Hillslope Runoff Representation With a Richards Equation‐Based Model

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