Abstract

Climate warming has significantly changed the hydrological cycle in cold regions, especially in areas with distributed permafrost. Groundwater flow and its interactions with surface water are important components of the hydrological process; however, few studies or modeling works have been based on long-term groundwater level, temperature, hydrogeochemistry or isotopic field observations from boreholes due to obstacles such as remote locations, limited infrastructure, and harsh work conditions. In the Hulugou catchment located in the headwater region of the Heihe River on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau (TP), we drilled four sets of depth-specific wells and monitored the dynamic groundwater levels and temperatures at different depths. Surface water (including river water, glacier meltwater, and snow meltwater), precipitation, groundwater from boreholes, spring water, and soil water samples were collected to measure the hydrochemistry, dissolved organic carbon (DOC), dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), and stable and radioactive isotopes at 64 sites. This study provides datasets of these groundwater parameters spanning six consecutive years of monitoring/measurements. These data can be used to investigate the groundwater flow process and the interactions between groundwater and surface water on the TP under global climate change. The datasets provided in this paper can be obtained at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5184470 (Ma et al., 2021b) and will be subject to further updates.

Highlights

  • As the “Third Pole” of the Earth, the Tibetan Plateau (TP) is known as the “Water Tower of Asia” and comprises the headwater regions of many large rivers in Asia, including the Linsang, Ganges, Indus, 30 Yellow and Yangtze Rivers (Qiu, 2008; Immerzeel et al, 2010)

  • In the Hulugou catchment located in the headwater region of the Heihe River on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau (TP), we drilled four sets of depth-specific wells and monitored the dynamic groundwater levels and temperatures at different depths

  • This study presents a systematic monitoring site scheme located in an alpine catchment in the 345 headwater region of the Heihe River with distributed permafrost and seasonally frozen ground

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Summary

Introduction

As the “Third Pole” of the Earth, the Tibetan Plateau (TP) is known as the “Water Tower of Asia” and comprises the headwater regions of many large rivers in Asia, including the Linsang, Ganges, Indus, 30 Yellow and Yangtze Rivers (Qiu, 2008; Immerzeel et al, 2010). Current studies on the interactions between groundwater and surface water on the TP have focused on tracing flow paths with different types of isotopic and geochemical data or building numerical waterheat coupling models to explore the influence of climate change on hydrological processes Great progress has been made in studying hydrological processes on the TP, including 75 research on changing streamflow compositions under the impact of climate change and frozen soil degradation (Wang et al, 2018; Cuo et al, 2019; Xu et al, 2019; Shen et al, 2020), little is known about the groundwater system or the processes that control groundwater and surface water interactions due to challenges associated with the poor field conditions and weak infrastructure on the TP (Yao et al, 2019a).

Study area
Layout of well groups
Sediments and their mineral compositions in the well groups
Monitoring of groundwater levels and ground temperatures
Collection and analysis of water samples
Sample collection and preservation
Water chemistry
DOC and DIC
Analysis of stable isotopes
Analysis of 3H and 14C isotopes
Findings
Conclusions
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