< Back to previous page

Project

Multi-method assessment of river-aquifer interactions in lowland floodplains across spatial scales

This research focuses on the hydrological processes for the “Future Floodplains” project. The floodplain hydrology is strongly related to the interactions between the shallow groundwater (GW) and the surface water (SW), especially in the hyporheic zone. The exchange fluxes between the river and aquifer are often characterized by a high temporal and spatial variability. For measuring the fluxes, a multi-method approach is considered in the selected study sites in the Scheldt catchment in Belgium. As groundwater head observations do not directly reveal the exchange fluxes, other state variable observations, like temperature measurements or hydrochemical analyses with different spatial support, will be performed to quantify the fluxes. The exchange fluxes will be computed using independent analytical or/and numerical methods. Afterwards, they will be used as the input data for building the hyporheic zone model. I will then develop an integrated multi-scale GW-SW model, which will couple the small scale hydrological model with a catchment-scale groundwater model. After the model calibration and validation using the multiple measured dataset, the coupled model will be able to stimulate the mid- to long-term hydrological status of the floodplains through the changes in channel morphology, climate change, land cover change and urbanization. Meanwhile, the output from the coupled GW-SW model such as groundwater levels and seepage rates will deliver input for developing the ecological model of the floodplains in other working package.

Date:11 Oct 2017 →  11 Oct 2021
Keywords:river-hyporheic-aquifer systems, fluxes, coupled modeling, heat transport, hydrochemistry
Disciplines:Geology
Project type:PhD project