Hydrological Transport in Shallow Catchments: : tracer discharge, travel time and water age

Abstract: This focuses on hydrological transport in shallow catchments with topography-driven flow paths. The thesis gives new insight to kinematic pathway models for estimation of tracer discharge at the catchment outlet. A semi-analytical methodology is presented for transient travel time and age distributions referred to as "kinematic pathway approach“(KPA) that accounts for dispersion at two levels of morphological and macro-dispersion. Macro-dispersion and morphological dispersion components are reflected in KPA by assuming an effective Péclet number and topographically driven pathway length distributions, respectively. The kinematic measure of the transport, defined as a characteristic velocity of water flow through the catchment is obtained from the overall water balance in the catchment. To include transformation process in its simplest form of linear decay/degradation a framework is presented that solves one-dimensional reactive transport with numerically simulated travel times as the independent variable. The proposed KPA and coupled transport framework for quantifying tracer discharge at the shallow catchment outlet are applied to two selected catchments in Sweden. KPA is applied to modeling of a 23-year long chloride data series for the Kringlan catchment whereas the implantation of the framework for quantifying natural attenuation is illustrated for the Forsmark catchment. Numerical simulations of Forsmark catchment advective travel times are obtained by means of particle tracking using the fully-integrated flow model MIKE SHE. The KPA is found to provide reasonable estimates of tracer discharge distribution when considering the transport controlled by hillslope processes associated with short topographically driven flow paths to adjacent discharge zones, e.g. rivers and lakes. Simulated natural attenuation for Forsmark is also estimated well provided that the pathway length distribution is skewed toward short pathway lengths. This fact is indicative of the controlling impact of topography on flow path length and travel time distributions in shallow catchments. Our work has shown that the pathway (Lagrangian) methodologies are promising as predictive tools for hydrological transport.