Abstract
Groundwater-surface water (GW-SW) interaction, as a key component in the cold region hydrologic cycle, is extremely sensitive to seasonal and climate change. Specifically, the dynamic change of snow cover and frozen soil bring additional challenges in observing and simulating hydrologic processes under GW-SW interactions in cold regions. Integrated hydrologic models are promising tools to simulate such complex processes and study the system behaviours as well as its responses to perturbations. The cold region integrated hydrologic models should be physically representative and fully considering the thermal-hydrologic processes under snow cover variations, freeze-thaw cycles in frozen soils and GW-SW interactions. Benchmarking and integration with scarce field observations are also critical in developing cold region integrated hydrologic models. This review summarizes the current status of hydrologic models suitable for cold environment, including distributed hydrologic models, cryo-hydrogeologic models, and fully-coupled cold region GW-SW models, with a specific focus on their concepts, numerical methods, benchmarking, and applications across scales. The current research can provide implications for cold region hydrologic model development and advance our understanding of altered environments in cold regions disturbed by climate change, such as permafrost degradation, early snow melt and water shortage.
Highlights
Cold regions are headwaters of many prominent rivers around the world and considered as the water towers of inland river basins in arid/semi-arid regions (Yao et al, 2012; Qin et al, 2017; Immerzeel et al, 2020)
The model was driven by on-site meteorological data with a 25 cm horizontal spatial resolution, and the simulation results exhibited a high degree of consistency with the snow depth, water table, and soil temperature observed in the Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE) Arctic Program of the U.S Department of Energy (US DOE), which demonstrated the accuracy of the fully-coupled groundwater-surface water (GW-Surface water (SW)) models in cold regions
Integrated hydrologic models of cold regions have emerged as promising tools to simulate the impacts of pronounced climate warming and seasonal changes on the groundwater-surface water (GW-SW) interactions and groundwater resources
Summary
Cold regions are headwaters of many prominent rivers around the world and considered as the water towers of inland river basins in arid/semi-arid regions (Yao et al, 2012; Qin et al, 2017; Immerzeel et al, 2020). Under the scenario of seasonal and climate changes, establishing an integrated hydrologic model to quantitatively simulate and predict the coupled processes of flow and heat transfer, their influencing factors and mechanisms, and most importantly, investigating the dynamics of GW-SW interactions under freeze-thaw cycles and snow cover variations in cold regions are emerging and Frontier topics of cryosphere, hydrology, and hydrogeology research. Soil freeze-thaw processes result in the phase change between ice and liquid water in groundwater systems, but they lead to the frequent transport of groundwater in different layers of aquifers and between subsurface and surface systems, affecting the amount of water involved in the regional hydrologic cycle.
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