HR: 1340h
AN: H43C-0508    [Abstracts]
TI: Water Balance and Residence Time in Stream Functional Units of Differing Scales
AU: * Payn, R A
EM: rpayn@mines.edu
AF: Colorado School of Mines, Department of Geology and Geological Engineering 1516 Illinois St, Golden, CO 80401 United States
AU: Gooseff, M N
EM: mgooseff@mines.edu
AF: Colorado School of Mines, Department of Geology and Geological Engineering 1516 Illinois St, Golden, CO 80401 United States
AU: McGlynn, B L
EM: bmcglynn@montana.edu
AF: Montana State University, Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences 334 Leon Johnson Hall PO Box 173120, Bozeman, MT 59717 United States
AU: Bencala, K E
EM: kbencala@usgs.gov
AF: US Geological Survey, MS 439 345 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025 United States
AU: Wondzell, S M
EM: swondzell@fs.fed.us
AF: USDA Forest Service, Olympia Forestry Sciences Laboratory Pacific Northwest Research Station, Olympia, WA 98512 United States
AU: Jencso, K
EM: kjencso@yahoo.com
AF: Montana State University, Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences 334 Leon Johnson Hall PO Box 173120, Bozeman, MT 59717 United States
AB: We are beginning investigations of relationships between stream-groundwater interactions and valley structure. Ultimately, these analyses will generate a conceptual foundation for scaling hydraulics of a stream functional unit to hydrodynamics of a watershed stream network. Our preliminary goal is to establish methods that quantify spatially explicit water balances and solute transport characteristics from stream reach to network scales. During summer of 2005, we employed simultaneous conservative tracer injections of Rhodamine WT at a constant rate and distributed chloride slugs. Breakthrough curves from these injections were used to characterize solute transport at spatial scales ranging from minimal mixing reaches (ca. 5-20 m) to the entire length of 2 headwater tributaries (ca. 3 km) in the Tenderfoot Creek Experimental Forest (USFS), Little Belt Mountains, Montana. In one tributary, results from multiple slug injections include net discharge changes ranging from -19% to +68% and tracer mass losses ranging from 2% to 40% over 28 adjacent 100-m reaches. In another tributary, chloride slug injections performed during plateau of a Rhodamine WT constant rate injection also suggest distributed variability in discharge change and tracer loss. Water balance variability at small scales within simultaneously measured large scale response allows us to explore how small scale hydrologic function operates within and contributes to the large scale context. In the future, terrain analysis of LIDAR and topographic survey data will be used to evaluate the dependence of hydrologic function on morphologic structure from channel to valley scales.
UR: http://www.mines.edu/~mgooseff/web_research/hydroscapes.html
DE: 1800 HYDROLOGY
DE: 1825 Geomorphology: fluvial (1625)
DE: 1830 Groundwater/surface water interaction
DE: 1839 Hydrologic scaling
DE: 1847 Modeling
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005