Sensitivity analysis of hydraulic conductivity and Manning's <i>n</i> parameters lead to new method to scale effective hydraulic conductivity across model resolutions

Foster, Lauren M.; Maxwell, R. M.

doi:10.1002/hyp.13327

Cited by 41 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…While changing K by two orders of magnitude, simulated flows from two scaled cases are marginally different in magnitude from the original case. Indeed, flows in the two cases behave similarly as observed by Foster and Maxwell (). When K was decreased by one order of magnitude, we see lower baseflow and higher peak flow compared to the baseline simulation.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 79%

“…Therefore, in addition to the lateral and no lateral simulations we also evaluate the sensitivity of our findings to the K value used. Foster and Maxwell () scaled K over two orders of magnitude for three respective layers of a ParFlow‐CLM model of the East River in Colorado, namely soils, geology and basement layers. They concluded that model outflows are most sensitive to K changes in the geology.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Simulating Groundwater‐Streamflow Connections in the Upper Colorado River Basin

Tran¹,

Zhang

Cohard

et al. 2020

Groundwater

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In mountain, snow driven catchments, snowmelt is supposed to be the primary contribution to river streamflows during spring. In these catchments the contribution of groundwater is not well documented because of the difficulty to monitor groundwater in such complex environment with deep aquifers. In this study we use an integrated hydrologic model to conduct numerical experiments that help quantify the effect of lateral groundwater flow on total annual and peak streamflow in predevelopment conditions. Our simulations focus on the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB; 2.8 × 10 5 km 2 ) a well-documented mountain catchment for which both streamflow and water table measurements are available for several important sub-basins. For the simulated water year, our results suggest an increase in peak flow of up to 57% when lateral groundwater flow processes are included-an unexpected result for flood conditions generally assumed independent of groundwater. Additionally, inclusion of lateral groundwater flow moderately improved the model match to observations. The correlation coefficient for mean annual flows improved from 0.84 for the no lateral groundwater flow simulation to 0.98 for the lateral groundwater flow one. Spatially we see more pronounced differences between lateral and no lateral groundwater flow cases in areas of the domain with steeper topography. We also found distinct differences in the magnitude and spatial distribution of streamflow changes with and without lateral groundwater flow between Upper Colorado River Sub-basins. A sensitivity test that scaled hydraulic conductivity over two orders of magnitude was conducted for the lateral groundwater flow simulations. These results show that the impact of lateral groundwater flow is as large or larger than an order of magnitude change in hydraulic conductivity. While our results focus on the UCRB, we feel that these simulations have relevance to other headwaters systems worldwide.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulating Groundwater‐Streamflow Connections in the Upper Colorado River Basin

Tran¹,

Zhang

Cohard

et al. 2020

Groundwater

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“…we have not yet compensated by changing other parameters. Recently a method has been proposed to improve these issues by 484 scaling horizontal hydraulic conductivity (Foster and Maxwell, 2019).…”

Section: Representation Of Rivers and Surface Roughnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Presentation and discussion of the high resolution atmosphere-land surface subsurface simulation dataset of the virtual Neckar catchment for the period 2007–2015

Schalge¹,

Baroni²,

Haese³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Abstract. Coupled numerical models, which simulate water and energy fluxes in the subsurface-land surface-atmosphere system in a physically consistent way are a prerequisite for the analysis and a better understanding of heat and matter exchange fluxes at compartmental boundaries and interdependencies of states across these boundaries. Complete state evolutions generated by such models may be regarded as a proxy of the real world, provided they are run at sufficiently high resolution and incorporate the most important processes. Such a virtual reality can be used to test hypotheses on the functioning of the coupled terrestrial system. Coupled simulation systems, however, face severe problems caused by the vastly different scales of the processes acting in and between the compartments of the terrestrial system, which also hinders comprehensive tests of their realism. We used the Terrestrial Systems Modeling Platform TerrSysMP, which couples the meteorological model COSMO, the land-surface model CLM, and the subsurface model ParFlow, to generate a virtual catchment for a regional terrestrial system mimicking the Neckar catchment in southwest Germany. Simulations for this catchment are made for the period 2007–2015, and at a spatial resolution of 400 m for the land surface and subsurface and 1.1 km for the atmosphere. Among a discussion of modelling challenges, the model performance is evaluated based on real observations covering several variables of the water cycle. We find that the simulated (virtual) catchment behaves in many aspects quite close to observations of the real Neckar catchment, e.g. concerning atmospheric boundary-layer height, precipitation, and runoff. But also discrepancies become apparent, both in the ability of the model to correctly simulate some processes which still need improvement such as overland flow, and in the realism of some observation operators like the satellite based soil moisture sensors. The whole raw dataset is available for interested users. The dataset described here is available via the CERA database (Schalge et al., 2020): https://doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/Neckar_VCS_v1.

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“…Here, we use a heuristic approach of simple averages to bound the expected range of upscaled vertical K S , where the arithmetic and harmonic mean (K arith and K harm ) are the upper and lower bounds, respectively, and the geometric mean (K geom ) is an intermediate value. K arith and K harm are typically used to approximate groundwater flow parallel and perpendicular to layering, respectively, in anisotropic systems (Freeze and Cherry, 1979). This concept has been generally been extended to variably-saturated flow (Mualem, 1984;Assouline and Or, 2006).…”

Section: Site Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The contaminant transport community has long recognized the strong influence of K scaling and geologic heterogeneity on transport processes (e.g., Gelhar et al, 1992;Sudicky and Huyakorn, 1991;Koltermann and Gorelick, 1996), and recent work has extended these concepts to assess their role on runoff generation, evapotranspiration (ET), and feedbacks between subsurface and land-surface water in integrated hydrologic models (Srivastava et al, 2014;Gilbert et al, 2016;Foster and Maxwell, 2019), but relatively little research has focused on the influence these factors for MAR processes specifically. Recent work has 2 https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2019-412 Preprint.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sensitivity of Hydrologic and Geologic Parameters on Recharge Processes in a Highly-Heterogeneous, Semi-Confined Aquifer System

Maples¹,

Foglia²,

Fogg³

et al. 2019

Preprint

Self Cite

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Abstract. Increasing reliance on groundwater resources has been observed worldwide during the past 50–70 years and has led to unsustainable groundwater abstraction in many regions, especially in semi-arid and arid alluvial groundwater basins. Managed aquifer recharge (MAR) has been promoted to replenish overdrafted groundwater basins and augment surface water supply. However, MAR feasibility in alluvial groundwater basins is complicated by complex geologic architecture that typically includes laterally-continuous, fine-texture confining units that can impede both recharge rates and regional propagation of increases in hydraulic head. Greater feasibility of MAR hinges on identifying locations where rapid, high-volume recharge that provides regional increases in pressure head are possible, but relatively little research has evaluated the factors that control MAR feasibility in alluvial groundwater basins. Here, we combine a transition probability Markov-chain geostatistical model of the subsurface geologic heterogeneity of the east side of the northern Central Valley, California, with the 3D, variably-saturated water flow code, ParFlow, to explore the variability of MAR feasibility in this region. We use a combination of computationally-efficient local and global sensitivity analyses to evaluate the relative importance of factors that contribute to MAR feasibility. A novel proxy parameter approach was used to describe the configuration and proportions of subsurface hydrofacies and water table depth for sensitivity analyses, and results suggest that recharge potential is relatively more sensitive to the variability of this proxy parameter than to the variablity of individual hydrofacies hydraulic properties. Results demonstrate that large variability of MAR feasibility is typical for alluvial aquifer systems and that outsize recharge rates are possible in select locations where interconnected, coarse-texture hydrofacies occur.

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Sensitivity analysis of hydraulic conductivity and Manning's n parameters lead to new method to scale effective hydraulic conductivity across model resolutions

Cited by 41 publications

References 56 publications

Simulating Groundwater‐Streamflow Connections in the Upper Colorado River Basin

Simulating Groundwater‐Streamflow Connections in the Upper Colorado River Basin

Presentation and discussion of the high resolution atmosphere-land surface subsurface simulation dataset of the virtual Neckar catchment for the period 2007–2015

Sensitivity of Hydrologic and Geologic Parameters on Recharge Processes in a Highly-Heterogeneous, Semi-Confined Aquifer System

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