October 30, 2017
Where does the water in streams come from when it rains?
Posted by Tom Gleeson
By Anne Jefferson
The title of this blog post might seem like a question with an obvious answer, or even a silly question to pose on a blog devoted to groundwater, but if you don’t see the connection between streamflow and underground water, you need to keep reading.
Water in streams during storms does come from the sky, but often it’s not the water droplets falling in a particular rain storm that are going rushing down the stream during that storm. Very little precipitation falls directly on the stream channel, because streams occupy very little of the landscape. So most water in a stream has to travel over or under the ground to get there. Traveling from some random point in a catchment to a stream takes time, and there are usually other water molecules between the freshly fallen raindrop and the channel.
Water molecules that can’t infiltrate into the ground become surface runoff. Surface runoff tends to reach the stream channel fairly quickly, because the water molecules encounter much less flow resistance than water moving through soil or bedrock and because all of the other water molecules between them and the stream are also on the same downhill express lane to the stream. So a water molecule that becomes surface runoff can reach a stream minutes to hours after the raindrop first hit the land surface.
On the other hand, raindrops that infiltrate into the ground take a much more leisurely approach to reaching the stream. Underground, flow resistance is really high, relative to what surface runoff encounters, because the water molecules have to squeeze through tiny and tortuous open spaces between soil particles, roots, and rock. They may even be trapped by capillary forces or stick to mineral or organic surfaces. Plus, underground, there are lots of other water droplets also slowly making their way to the stream. Being a water molecule that goes underground to reach a stream is not so much taking an express lane, as joining the back of a barely moving traffic jam that stretches as far as the eye can see. In the minutes, hours, and days during which a stream runs high following a rainstorm, that poor underground water molecule may only have moved a few meters to a few hundred meters toward the channel. Indeed, its main function in joining the back of the traffic jam was to give a pressure wave nudge to the water molecules closer to the channel, urge them to get a move on, and increase the rate they discharge into the stream.
With those general concepts in mind, let’s turn our attention to humid, forested landscapes. Most rain will infiltrate into the soil, disappear underground, and join the back of the traffic jam. As a consequence, when we look at the water rushing along in a stream channel, during or shortly after a storm, mostly we are not seeing water that fell from the sky in the storm. We’re seeing the ghosts of storms past. Catchment hydrologists call this “old” water. To put some numbers on it, 60-80% of the volume of streamflow during and immediately following a storm is typically old water. Even at the peak of the streamflow, ~50% of the water in the stream is old water.
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Anne Jefferson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Kent State University. Anne‘s research focuses on watershed hydrology, groundwater-surface water interactions, and landscape evolution in human-altered and volcanic landscapes. Current projects of her’s focus on green infrastructure, stormwater management, and stream restoration. Keep up to date with Anne by clicking on any of the links below:
Research profile | Twitter | Personal Website
Dear Ms. Jensen,
Thank you very much for this great post. I work at a non profit in the San Benito Mountains of California. Using native land management techniques we are beginning to reclaim the health of the land and prove the relationship of techniques of land management and the availability of ground water.
Your post with the links you have included are invaluable to us as we have no hydrologist to help with our project and no hydrologist on our advisory board.
Regards,
Veronica Stork