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Constraining Bedrock Groundwater Residence Times in a Mountain System with Environmental Tracer Observations and Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification: Modeling and Data Package

Creators: Nicholas ThirosORCID, Erica Siirila-WoodburnORCID, P. James Dennedy-Frank, Kenneth Williams, W. Payton Gardner
Year: 2025
DOI: 10.15485/1960042
License: See source for details
Location: The East River (ER) is a snow‐dominated, headwater basin of the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB) located in the western United States. The ER is the designated testbed of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (WFSFA). Through WFSFA, observational networks have been established to measure stream discharge and precipitation chemistry. The ER is considered representative of many snow‐dominated headwaters of the Rocky Mountains. The study domain encompasses nearly 85 square km, a 1.4‐km vertical drop in elevation (4,120 to 2,760 m) and pristine alpine, subalpine, montane, and riparian ecosystems. The ER contains high‐energy mountain streams to low‐energy meandering floodplains and is eroding primarily into the Cretaceous, carbon‐rich, marine shale of the Mancos Formation. Additional metadata on specific locations within the watershed are provided in the following related data package: Varadharajan C. et al. (2022) doi:10.15485/1660962
Temporal extent: 2021-05-09 to 2021-05-13
Bounding box: 38.880°N to 39.034°N, -107.050°W to -106.880°W
Publisher: RMBL
Tags: East River, hydrology, groundwater, modeling, waterchemisty, Residence Times, Environmental Tracers, ESS-DIVE File Level Metadata Reporting Format, CATEGORICAL:NONE Dissolved Noble Gases, Numerical Model, Alpine & Subalpine Ecology, Hydrology & Watersheds, Snow & Ice, Groundwater, Geology & Tectonics, Geochemistry & Isotopes, Weather & Atmospheric Science, Data Science & Modeling, Gunnison Basin, Research Programs

Description

Groundwater residence times provide fundamental descriptions of hydrologic dynamics and mixing processes in mountainous watersheds. Yet, few observational datasets that can constrain groundwater residence times over broad timescales are available in high elevation mountain systems. Here we present field observations from May 2021 of dissolved noble gases (He, Ne, Ar, Kr, and Xe), Chloroflourcarbons (CFCs), Sulfurhexaflouride (SF6), and tritium (3H) sampled from the Pumphouse Lower Montane study site (wells PLM1, PLM6, and PLM7) within the East River Watershed, Colorado. The presented noble gas (PLM_noblegas_2021.csv) and environmental tracer (PLM_tracers_2021.csv) observation datasets, along with the associated modeling scripts, aide in quantifying groundwater residence times and recharge conditions in a high elevation mountain system. Furthermore, the modeling scripts quantify groundwater residence time and noble gas recharge condition uncertainties using a novel Markov-chain Monte Carlo approach. All data modeling scripts are written in the Python code.

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