The role of surface storage in a low‐gradient Arctic watershed

Abstract

[1] The Arctic land surface water balance plays an important role in regulating the planetary heat balance and global ocean circulation. Lakes and wetlands are common features in the low-gradient Putuligayuk River watershed in northern Alaska, with important implications for the annual water balance. Evapotranspiration exceeds precipitation over the summer, and there is a gradual reduction in wetland extent. Total inundated area derived from RADARSAT ScanSAR synthetic aperture radar images throughout 1999 and 2000 varied from 15 to 67 percent of the 471 km 2 watershed. The hydrological system becomes disconnected within 2 weeks of snowmelt, and overland flow largely ceases. End-of-winter snow water equivalent and discharge during the melt period for 1999, 2000, and 2001 were used to estimate that between 30 and 37 mm (24-42 percent) of snow meltwater serves to recharge the evaporation deficit of the previous summer. The percent of snowmelt entering storage is dependent on the available surface storage.

PeRL: a circum-Arctic Permafrost Region Pond and Lake database

“…Waterbody maps therefore reflect the local wa- ter balance at the time of image acquisition. Seasonal reduction in surface water extent, however, is largest in the first 2 weeks following snowmelt (Bowling et al, 2003). All PeRL maps date from the late summer season so that snowmelt and the early summer season are excluded.…”

Drainage Network Structure and Hydrologic Behavior of Three Lake-Rich Watersheds on the Arctic Coastal Plain, Alaska

“…2007;Lesack and Marsh. 2010) and across watersheds using remote sensing (Bowling et al, 2003), which describes the strongly seasonal and interannually variable nature of surface-water systems in the ACP. Such variation in connectivity is more generally recognized as dynamic drainage density (Tucker and Bras, 1998;Spence, 2007) or as variable source-area contributions to streamflow and is a critical watershed process for understanding runoff response in the Arctic (Dunne et al, 1975;Roulet and Woo, 1988), as well as how aquatic ecosystems function in terms of fish migration and colonization and in terms of water, nutrient, and sediment exchange (Lesack and Marsh, 2010).…”

“…For instance, nested watershed studies from the Kuparuk River have described the importance of drainage network structure and active-layer dynamics in generating runoff regimes differentially influenced by snowmelt and rainfall along a gradient from the mountains to coastal plain (Kane et al, 1991;McNamara et al, 1998;Kane et al, 2003). Few hydrologic monitoring programs and watershed studies have been conducted on rivers systems with entirely ACP origins, however, with the main example being the Putuligayuk River where work by Bowling et al (2003) highlights the important role of lake and wetland storage and connectivity in runoff generation. Yet given the known heterogeneity of ACP landscapes with lake area extents ranging from Ͻ10 to Ͼ30% (Sellmann et al, 1975;Grosse et al, 2012) and the potential for future lake and channel evolution in ACP environments (Smith et al, 2005;Jorgenson and Shur, 2007;McNamara and Kane, 2009), few systematic studies have analyzed how this variation in watershed structure relates to aquatic habitat and hydrological processes.…”

“…Many watersheds draining the Arctic Coastal Plain (ACP) of northern Alaska and northwest Canada have complex drainage patterns resulting from the interplay among permafrost soils, lowrelief macro-topography and rough micro-topography, and abundant lakes and wetlands (Roulet and Woo, 1988;Bowling et al, 2003). The structure and organization of drainage networks provide the framework for understanding and predicting watershed hydrologic behavior (Tucker and Bras, 1998;McNamara et al, 1999) that is driven by strongly seasonal hydrologic fluxes, active-layer dynamics, and storage regimes that dominate the Arctic (Kane et al, 1991;McNamara et al, 1998;Woo and Guan, 2006).…”

“…However, only a few Arctic watersheds have been monitored and described comprehensively to C. D. ARP ET AL. / 385 1523-0430/6 $7.00 establish a conceptual framework applicable to ACP landscapes (e.g., (Bowling et al, 2003;Lesack and Marsh, 2010).…”