Streamflow partitioning and transit time distribution in snow-dominated basins as a function of climate

Abstract

Snowmelt is the principal control on the timing and magnitude of water flow through mountainous watersheds. The effects of precipitation type and quantity on storage and hydrologic connectivity in mountainous systems were explored by combining the observed stable isotope δ18O in rain, snow, snowmelt, and streamflow with numerically simulated hydrologic boundary fluxes and inverse techniques applied to transient travel time distributions (TTD) using StorAge Selection (SAS) functions. Hydrologic simulations of the East River (ER, 85 km2), a snow-dominated Colorado River headwater basin, for water years 2006–2017 were used to test a diverse set of snow accumulation scenarios. During the snowmelt period, the ER released younger water during high storage periods across seasonal and annual timescales (an “inverse storage effect”). Additionally, more young water was released from storage during wet years than during dry years. However, wet years also appeared to increase hydrologic connectivity, which simultaneously flushed older water from the basin. During years with reduced snowpack, flow paths were inactivated and snowmelt remained in the subsurface to become older water that was potentially reactivated in subsequent wet years. Incremental warming in hydrologic model simulations was used to evaluate TTD sensitivity to precipitation changing from snow to rain. Despite the altered timing of boundary fluxes because of warming, years with basin average precipitation above 3.25 mm d−1 (1200 mm y−1) were resilient to temperature increases up to 10 °C with respect to annual water balance partitioning and streamflow TTD. In contrast, years with less precipitation were sensitive to increased temperatures, showing marked increases in the fraction of inflow lost to evapotranspiration. Younger water was preferentially lost to evapotranspiration, which led to an increase in the mean age of streamflow in drier years.