Travel times of water
Many streams respond promptly to rainstorms, even though storm runoff often contains relatively little water that originates from current rainfall. Typical aquifers feeding these streams consist mostly of water that is decades to millennia in age. In contrast, significant fractions of typical river flows are less than approximately three months old, indicating that river waters are generally much younger than the aquifers that feed them. Understanding the juxtaposition of old and young waters is key to understanding hydrological processes, biogeochemical cycles, contaminant transport, and chemical weathering. We use field observations, simple mathematical models, and novel analyses of tracer data to unravel how water travels through the environment.
Read more
Allen, S. T., Kirchner, J. W., Braun, S., Siegwolf, R. T. W., and Goldsmith, G. R. (2019). external pageSeasonal origins of soil water used by trees, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 23, 1199-1210
Allen, S. T., von Freyberg, J., Weiler, M., Goldsmith, G. R., & Kirchner, J. W. ( 2019). The seasonal origins of streamwater in Switzerland. Geophysical Research Letters, 46, 10425– 10434.
Berghuijs, W. R., and J. W. Kirchner (2017), external pageThe relationship between contrasting ages of groundwater and streamflow, Geophys. Res. Lett., 44, 8925–8935.
Jasechko, S., J. W. Kirchner, J. M. Welker, & J. J. McDonnell (2016), external pageSubstantial proportion of global streamflow less than three months old, Nat. Geosci., 9, 126–129.
Jasechko, S., J. W. Kirchner, et al. (2017), external pageGlobal aquifers dominated by fossil groundwaters but wells vulnerable to modern contamination, Nat. Geosci., 10, 425–429.
Kirchner, J. W., X. Feng, & C. Neal (2000), external pageFractal stream chemistry and its implications for contaminant transport in catchments, Nature, 403, 524–527.
Kirchner, J. W. (2003), external pageA double paradox in catchment hydrology and geochemistry, Hydrol. Process., 17: 871–874.
Kirchner, J. W., & Neal, C. (2013), external pageUniversal fractal scaling in stream chemistry and its implications for solute transport and water quality trend detection, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110, 12213-12218.
Kirchner, J. W. (2016), external pageAggregation in environmental systems – Part 1: Seasonal tracer cycles quantify young water fractions, but not mean transit times, in spatially heterogeneous catchments, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 20, 279-297.
Kirchner, J. W. (2016), external pageAggregation in environmental systems – Part 2: Catchment mean transit times and young water fractions under hydrologic nonstationarity, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 20, 299-328.
Kirchner, J. W. (2019) external pageQuantifying new water fractions and transit time distributions using ensemble hydrograph separation: theory and benchmark tests, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 23, 303–349, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-303-2019.
Kirchner, J. W., & Allen, S. T. (2020), external pageSeasonal partitioning of precipitation between streamflow and evapotranspiration, inferred from end-member splitting analysis, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 24, 17–39, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-17-2020.
Knapp, J. L. A., Neal, C., Schlumpf, A., Neal, M., & Kirchner, J. W. (2019), external pageNew water fractions and transit time distributions at Plynlimon, Wales, estimated from stable water isotopes in precipitation and streamflow, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 23, 4367–4388, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-4367-2019.
Knapp, J. L. A., von Freyberg, J., Studer, B., Kiewiet, L., & Kirchner, J. W. (2020), external pageConcentration-discharge relationships vary among hydrological events, reflecting differences in event characteristics, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2019-684, in review, 2020.
von Freyberg, J., Allen, S. T., Seeger, S., Weiler, M., and Kirchner, J. W. (2017). external pageSensitivity of young water fractions to hydro-climatic forcing and landscape properties across 22 Swiss catchments, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 22, 3841-3861.
von Freyberg, J., Studer, B., Rinderer, M., and Kirchner, J. W. (2018), external pageStudying catchment storm response using event- and pre-event-water volumes as fractions of precipitation rather than discharge, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 22, 5847–5865, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-5847-2018.
Wang, L., von Freyberg, J., van Meerveld, I., Seibert, J., & Kirchner, J. W. (2019). external pageWhat is the best time to take stream isotope samples for event-based model calibration?. Journal of Hydrology, 577, 123950.