Hydrologic controls on hyporheic exchange in a headwater mountain stream

Abstract

The spatial and temporal scales of hyporheic exchange within the stream corridor are controlled by stream discharge and groundwater inflow interacting with streambed morphology. While decades of study have resulted in a clear understanding of how morphologic form controls hyporheic exchange at the feature scale, we lack comparable predictive power related to stream discharge and the spatial structure of groundwater inflows at the reach scale, where spatial heterogeneity in both geomorphic setting and hydrologic forcing are present. In this study, we simulated vertical hyporheic exchange along a 600 m mountain stream reach under high, medium, and low stream discharge while considering groundwater inflow as negligible, spatially uniform, or proportional to upslope accumulated area. Most changes to hyporheic flow path residence time or length in response to stream discharge were small (<5%), suggesting that discharge is a secondary control relative to morphologically driven hyporheic exchange. Groundwater inflow was a primary control and mostly caused decreases in hyporheic flow path residence time and length. This finding generally agrees with expectations from the literature; however, flow path response was not consistent across the study reach. Instead, we found that flow paths driven by large hydraulic gradients coinciding with large morphologic features were less sensitive to changes in groundwater inflow than those driven by hydraulic gradients similar to the valley gradient. Our results indicate that consideration of heterogeneous arrangement of morphologic features is necessary to differentiate between hyporheic flow paths that persist in time and those that are sensitive to changing hydrologic conditions.