The effects of a low-permeability lens on hyporheic exchange intensity

Abstract

Hyporheic exchange induced by dunes is a key process controlling water fluxes and biogeochemical process in river network, which has gained significant advances. Owing to the limitation of instrumental detection at small spatial scales, previous studies mainly focused on dune-induced hyporheic exchange in homogeneous systems and the impacts of a low-permeability lens on hyporheic process is still unknown. 2-D laboratory flume experiments were conducted in this study to quantitatively analyze the response mechanism of hyporheic exchange to the spatial locations of a low-permeability lens. Results indicated that the lens has hindering effects on the hyporheic exchange process and when located at the center of the horizontal location, the hindering effects were the weakest. The effect weakens when the vertical locations of the lens getting deeper. With the lens moving from the locations closer to the upstream face to that closer to the downstream face of the dunes, or moving from a shallow depth to a deep depth, the flowing path of hyporheic exchange become less influenced by the lens and the area of HZ is getting larger.