Synoptic Multi-tracer Sensing for Mapping Groundwater-Surface Water Discharges and Estimating Reactive Nitrate Loading along a Gaining Lowland River

Abstract:

Distributed groundwater (GW) discharges to surface water (GW-SW discharges) in river systems remain difficult to delineate across spatiotemporal scales yet are important to understand with respect to link land management practices to nonpoint source constituent loading. In this work, we develop and test a relatively low-cost strategy for watershed-scale mapping distributed GW-SW discharges for nitrate (NO₃^-) in a gaining lowland river. We employ ambient GW specific conductance (SC) and nitrate as tracers using a high-resolution longitudinal synoptic sensing along the lower Merced River (38 river km) in Central California. Using available GW SC, we first calibrate a simple distributed GW-SW discharge model (segment-by-segment mixing model) at 1-km resolution for 13 synoptic sampling events at upstream daily flows ranging from 1.3 to 31.6 m³s^-1. We then apply the distributed discharge estimates to a similar distributed nitrate loading model, adding a first-order decay term representing shallow aquifer denitrification along the GW-SW flow path. Best-fitting model outcomes (RMSE = 0.06-0.98 mg L^-1) were found when we censored GW nitrate data following below detection thresholds (typically 0.5 mg L^-1 NO₃-N). The range of reach-estimated dimensionless denitrification rate terms varied from 0 to 0.432, which is slightly lower than previous regional results (0.17-1.06), accounting for our reach travel time.