Search

The hyporheic zone, defined by shallow subsurface pathways through river beds and banks beginning and ending at the river, is an integral and unique component of fluvial systems. It hosts myriad hydrologically controlled processes that are potentially coupled in complex ways. Understanding these processes and the connections between them is critical since these processes are not only important locally but integrate to impact increasingly larger scale biogeochemical functioning of the river corridor up to the river network scale. Thus, the hyporheic zone continues to be a growing research focus for many hydrologists for more than half the history of Water Resources Research. This manuscript partly summarizes the historical development of hyporheic zone hydrologic science as gleaned from papers published in Water Resources Research, from the birth of the concept of the hyporheic zone as a hydrologic black box (sometimes referred to as transient storage zone), to its adolescent years of being torn between occasionally competing research perspectives of interrogating the hyporheic zone from a surface or subsurface view, to its mature emergence as an interdisciplinary research field that employs the wide array of state-of-the-art tools available to the modern hydrologist. The field is vibrant and moving in the right direction of addressing critical fundamental and applied questions with no clear end in sight in its growth. There are exciting opportunities for scientists that are able to tightly link the allied fields of geology, geomorphology, hydrology, geochemistry, and ecology to tackle the many open problems in hyporheic zone science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from laboratory experiments on a 143 cm tall and 14.5 cm diameter column, packed with Wedron sand with varied constant upper boundary fluxes and water table velocities for both falling and rising water tables are used to validate a finite water-content vadose zone simulation methodology. The one-dimensional finite water-content Talbot and Ogden (2008) (T-O) infiltration and redistribution method was improved to simulate groundwater table dynamic effects and compared against the numerical solution of the Richards equation using Hydrus-1D. Both numerical solutions agreed satisfactorily with time series measurements of water content. Results showed similar performance for both methods, with the T-O method on average having higher Nash-Sutcliffe efficiencies and smaller absolute biases. Hydrus-1D was more accurate in predicting deponding times in the case of a falling water table, while Hydrus-1D and the T-O method had similar errors in predicted ponding times in the case of a rising water table in six of nine tests. The improved T-O method was able to predict general features of vadose zone moisture dynamics with moving water table and surface infiltration using an explicit, mass-conservative formulation. The advantage of an explicit formulation is that it is numerically simple, using forward Euler solution methodology, and is guaranteed to converge and to conserve mass. These properties make the improved T-O method presented in this paper a robust and computationally efficient alternative to the numerical solution of the Richards equation in hydrological modeling applications involving groundwater table dynamic effects on vadose zone soil moistures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The age distribution of water in hydrologic systems has received renewed interest recently, especially in relation to watershed response to rainfall inputs. The purpose of this contribution is first to draw attention to existing theories of age distributions in population dynamics, fluid mechanics and stochastic groundwater, and in particular to the McKendrick-von Foerster equation and its generalizations and solutions. A second and more important goal is to clarify that, when hydrologic fluxes are modeled by means of time-varying stochastic processes, the age distributions must themselves be treated as random functions. Once their probabilistic structure is obtained, it can be used to characterize the variability of age distributions in real systems and thus help quantify the inherent uncertainty in the field determination of water age. We illustrate these concepts with reference to a stochastic storage model, which has been used as a minimalist model of soil moisture and streamflow dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detailed numerical analyses of flow and transport were used to investigate the effect of spatially connected features on transport in three-dimensional (3-D), spatially heterogeneous, combined vadose zone-groundwater flow systems. Formations with spatially connected fine-textured and coarse-textured features (F-formation and C-formation, respectively), representing the10th and the 90th percentiles of the distributions of the formation's hydraulic parameters, respectively, were considered here. Results of the analyses suggest that in steady state flow, when the unsaturated zone of the combined flow domains is relatively wet, as compared with a Multivariate-Gaussian (MG) formation, spatially connected features may reduce the solute first arrival time, particularly in the C-formation, and may enhance the spreading of the solute breakthrough, particularly in the F-formation. The effect of the spatially connected features on the hydrological response, however, decreases as the unsaturated zone becomes drier. The latter result stems from the decrease in the fraction of the water-filled, pore-space occupied by the connected structures, with decreasing water content. The latter finding also explains the result that the response of more realistic, combined flow systems, whose unsaturated zone is associated with relatively low, intermittent water contents, is essentially independent of the spatially connected features of the formations, regardless of their soil texture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]