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In forested, seasonally dry watersheds, winter rains commonly replenish moisture deficits in the vadose zone before recharging underlying hillslope groundwater systems that sustain streamflow. However, the relative inaccessibility of the subsurface has hindered efforts to include the role of storage deficits, primarily generated by plant-water uptake, in moderating groundwater recharge. Here, we compare groundwater recharge inferred from the storage-discharge relationship with independent, distributed estimates of vadose zone storage deficits across 12 undisturbed California watersheds, thereby tracking the evolution of the deficit-recharge relationship without intensive field instrumentation. We find accrued deficits during the dry season alone insufficiently explain differences in the wet season partitioning of rainfall due to the non-monotonic behavior of the deficit during the subsequent wet season. Tracking the deficit at the storm event-scale within the wet season, however, reveals a characteristic response in groundwater to increasing rainfall not captured in the seasonal analysis, and may improve estimates of the rainfall required to generate recharge and streamflow on a per-storm basis. Our findings demonstrate the potential for existing public datasets to better capture water partitioning within the subsurface using a combined deficit-recharge approach, though our analysis is currently limited to basins with select characteristics. CODE AVAILABLE ON GITHUB: https://github.com/noah-beniteznelson/recharge_deficit
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Implications for groundwater recharge from stable isotopic composition of precipitation in Hawai'i during the 2017–2018 La Niña
Abstract The project captured a subset of the hydrological cycle for the tropical island of O'ahu, linking precipitation to groundwater recharge and aquifer storage. We determined seasonal storm events contributed more to aquifer recharge than year‐round baseline orographic trade wind rainfall. Hydrogen and oxygen isotope values from an island‐wide rain collector network with 20 locations deployed for 16 months and sampled at 3‐month intervals were used to create the first local meteoric water line for O'ahu. Isotopic measurements were influenced by the amount effect, seasonality, storm type, and La Niña, though little elevation control was noted. Certain groundwater compositions from legacy data showed a strong similarity with collected precipitation from our stations. The majority of these significant relationships were between wet season precipitation and groundwater. A high number of moderate and heavy rainfall days during the dry season, large percentage of event‐based rainfall, and wind directions outside of the typical NE trade wind direction were characteristics of the 2017–2018 wet season. This indicates that the majority of wet season precipitation is from event‐based storms rather than typical trade wind weather. The deuterium‐excess values provided the strongest evidence of a relationship between groundwater and different precipitation sources, indicating that this may be a useful metric for determining the extent of recharge from different rain events and systems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1945972
- PAR ID:
- 10381043
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Hydrological Processes
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 24
- ISSN:
- 0885-6087
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 4675-4696
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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