Geology topics

Rosemary W.H. Carroll

Publications and source records attributed to Rosemary W.H. Carroll.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2025

The role of bedrock circulation depth and porosity in mountain streamflow response to prolonged drought

Quantitative understanding is lacking on how the depth of active groundwater circulation in bedrock affects mountain streamflow response to a multi‐year drought. We use an integrated hydrological model to explore the sensitivity of a variety of streamflow metrics to bedrock circulation depth and porosity under a plausible extreme drought scenario lasting up to 5 years. Endmember depth versus hydraulic conductivity relationships and porosity values for fractured crystalline rock are simulated. With drought, a deeper circulation system with higher drainable porosity more effectively buffers minimum flow and significantly limits perennial stream loss in comparison to a shallow circulation system. Streamflow buffering is accomplished through extensive groundwater storage loss. However, deeper circulation systems experience prolonged recovery from drought in comparison to storage‐limited shallow systems. Research highlights the importance of characterizing the deeper bedrock hydrogeology in mountainous watersheds to better understand and predict drought impacts on stream ecosystem health and water resource sustainability.

Colorado↗

USGS2024

Declining groundwater storage expected to amplify mountain streamflow reductions in a warmer world

Groundwater interactions with mountain streams are often simplified in model projections, potentially leading to inaccurate estimates of streamflow response to climate change. Here, using a high-resolution, integrated hydrological model extending 400 m into the subsurface, we find groundwater an important and stable source of historical streamflow in a mountainous watershed of the Colorado River. In a warmer climate, increased forest water use is predicted to reduce groundwater recharge resulting in groundwater storage loss. Losses are expected to be most severe during dry years and cannot recover to historical levels even during simulated wet periods. Groundwater depletion substantially reduces annual streamflow with intermittent conditions predicted when precipitation is low. Expanding results across the region suggests groundwater declines will be highest in the Colorado Headwater and Gunnison basins. Our research highlights the tight coupling of vegetation and groundwater dynamics and that excluding explicit groundwater response to warming may underestimate future reductions in mountain streamflow.

Nature Water↗

USGS2024

Stream water sourcing from high-elevation snowpack inferred from stable isotopes of water: A novel application of d-excess values

About 80 % of the precipitation at the Colorado River's headwaters is snow, and the resulting snowmelt-driven hydrograph is a crucial water source for about 40 million people. Snowmelt from alpine and subalpine snowpack contributes substantially to groundwater recharge and river flow. However, the dynamics of snowmelt progression are not well understood because observations of the high-elevation snowpack are difficult due to challenging access in complex mountainous terrain as well as the cost and labor intensity of currently available methods. We present a novel approach to infer the processes and dynamics of high-elevation snowmelt contributions predicated upon stable hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios observed in streamflow. We show that deuterium-excess (d-excess) values of stream water could serve as a comparatively cost-effective proxy for a catchment-integrated signal of high-elevation snowmelt contributions to catchment runoff. We sampled stable hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios of the precipitation, snowpack, and stream water in the East River, a headwater catchment of the Colorado River, and the stream water of larger catchments at sites on the Gunnison River and Colorado River. The d-excess of snowpack increased with elevation; the upper subalpine and alpine snowpack ( > 3200 m) had substantially higher d-excess compared to lower elevations ( < 3200 m) in the study area. The d-excess values of stream water reflected this because d-excess values increased as the higher-elevation snowpack contributed more to stream water generation later in the snowmelt/runoff season. End-member mixing analyses based on the d-excess data showed that the share of high-elevation snowmelt contributions within the snowmelt hydrograph was on average 44 % and generally increased during melt period progression, up to 70 %. The observed pattern was consistent during 6 years for the East River, and a similar relation was found for the larger catchments on the Gunnison and Colorado rivers. High-elevation snowpack contributions were found to be higher for years with lower snowpack and warmer spring temperatures. Thus, we conclude that the d-excess of stream water is a viable proxy to observe changes in high-elevation snowmelt contributions in catchments at various scales. Inter-catchment comparisons and temporal trends of the d-excess of stream water could therefore serve as a catchment-integrated measure to monitor if mountain systems rely on high-elevation water inputs more during snow drought compared to years of average snowpack depths.

EUGsphere↗

USGS2020

Baseflow age distributions and depth of active groundwater flow in a snow‐dominated mountain headwater basin

Deeper flows through bedrock in mountain watersheds could be important, but lack of data to characterize bedrock properties limits understanding. To address data scarcity, we combine a previously published integrated hydrologic model of a snow‐dominated, headwater basin of the Colorado River with a new method for dating baseflow age using dissolved gas tracers SF 6 , CFC‐113, N 2 , and Ar. The original flow model predicts the majority of groundwater flow through shallow alluvium (<8 m) sitting on top of less permeable bedrock. The water moves too quickly and is unable to reproduce observed SF 6 concentrations. To match gas data, bedrock permeability is increased to allow a larger fraction of deeper and older groundwater flow (median 112 m). The updated hydrologic model indicates interannual variability in baseflow age (3–12 years) is controlled by the volume of seasonal interflow and tightly coupled to snow accumulation and monsoon rain. Deeper groundwater flow remains stable (11.7 ± 0.7 years) as a function mean historical recharge to bedrock hydraulic conductivity (R/K). A sensitivity analysis suggests that increasing bedrock K effectively moves this alpine basin away from its original conceptualization of hyperlocalized groundwater flow (high R/K) with groundwater age insensitive to changes in water inputs. Instead, this basin is situated close to the precipitation threshold defining recharge controlled groundwater flow conditions (low R/K) in which groundwater age increases with small reductions in precipitation. Work stresses the need to explore alternative methods characterizing bedrock properties in mountain basins to better quantify deeper groundwater flow and predict their hydrologic response to change.

Colorado↗

USGS2019

The importance of interflow to groundwater recharge in a snowmelt-dominated headwater basin

Understanding the sensitivity of groundwater generation to climate in a mountain system is complicated by the tight coupling of snow dynamics to vegetation and topography. To address these feedbacks, we combine light detection and ranging (LiDAR)-derived snow observations with an integrated hydrologic model to quantify spatially and temporally distributed water fluxes across varying climate conditions in a Colorado River headwater basin. Results indicate that annual groundwater flow is an important and stable source of stream water. However, interflow decreases during drought as a function increased plant water use and the relative fraction of groundwater to streams increases. Seasonal snowmelt and vegetation water use regulate small recharge rates in the lower portions of the basin, but snowmelt transported via interflow from high mountain ridges toward convergent topographic zones defines preferential recharge in the upper subalpine. Recharge in this zone appears decoupled from annual climate variability and resilient to drought.

Colorado↗

USGS2016

Evaluating mountain meadow groundwater response to Pinyon-Juniper and temperature in a great basin watershed

This research highlights development and application of an integrated hydrologic model (GSFLOW) to a semiarid, snow-dominated watershed in the Great Basin to evaluate Pinyon-Juniper (PJ) and temperature controls on mountain meadow shallow groundwater. The work used Google Earth Engine Landsat satellite and gridded climate archives for model evaluation. Model simulations across three decades indicated that the watershed operates on a threshold response to precipitation (P) >400 mm/y to produce a positive yield (P-ET; 9%) resulting in stream discharge and a rebound in meadow groundwater levels during these wetter years. Observed and simulated meadow groundwater response to large P correlates with above average predicted soil moisture and with a normalized difference vegetation index threshold value >0.3. A return to assumed pre-expansion PJ conditions or an increase in temperature to mid-21st century shifts yielded by only ±1% during the multi-decade simulation period; but changes of approximately ±4% occurred during wet years. Changes in annual yield were largely dampened by the spatial and temporal redistribution of evapotranspiration across the watershed: Yet the influence of this redistribution and vegetation structural controls on snowmelt altered recharge to control water table depth in the meadow. Even a small-scale removal of PJ (0.5 km 2 ) proximal to the meadow will promote a stable, shallow groundwater system resilient to droughts, while modest increases in temperature will produce a meadow susceptible to declining water levels and a community structure likely to move toward dry and degraded conditions.

Nevada↗

USGS2016

Assessing the role of climate and resource management on groundwater dependent ecosystem changes in arid environments with the Landsat archive

Groundwater dependent ecosystems (GDEs) rely on near-surface groundwater. These systems are receiving more attention with rising air temperature, prolonged drought, and where groundwater pumping captures natural groundwater discharge for anthropogenic use. Phreatophyte shrublands, meadows, and riparian areas are GDEs that provide critical habitat for many sensitive species, especially in arid and semi-arid environments. While GDEs are vital for ecosystem services and function, their long-term (i.e. ~ 30 years) spatial and temporal variability is poorly understood with respect to local and regional scale climate, groundwater, and rangeland management. In this work, we compute time series of NDVI derived from sensors of the Landsat TM, ETM +, and OLI lineage for assessing GDEs in a variety of land and water management contexts. Changes in vegetation vigor based on climate, groundwater availability, and land management in arid landscapes are detectable with Landsat. However, the effective quantification of these ecosystem changes can be undermined if changes in spectral bandwidths between different Landsat sensors introduce biases in derived vegetation indices, and if climate, and land and water management histories are not well understood. The objective of this work is to 1) use the Landsat 8 under-fly dataset to quantify differences in spectral reflectance and NDVI between Landsat 7 ETM + and Landsat 8 OLI for a range of vegetation communities in arid and semiarid regions of the southwestern United States, and 2) demonstrate the value of 30-year historical vegetation index and climate datasets for assessing GDEs. Specific study areas were chosen to represent a range of GDEs and environmental conditions important for three scenarios: baseline monitoring of vegetation and climate, riparian restoration, and groundwater level changes. Google's Earth Engine cloud computing and environmental monitoring platform is used to rapidly access and analyze the Landsat archive along with downscaled North American Land Data Assimilation System gridded meteorological data, which are used for both atmospheric correction and correlation analysis. Results from the cross-sensor comparison indicate a benefit from the application of a consistent atmospheric correction method, and that NDVI derived from Landsat 7 and 8 are very similar within the study area. Results from continuous Landsat time series analysis clearly illustrate that there are strong correlations between changes in vegetation vigor, precipitation, evaporative demand, depth to groundwater, and riparian restoration. Trends in summer NDVI associated with riparian restoration and groundwater level changes were found to be statistically significant, and interannual summer NDVI was found to be moderately correlated to interannual water-year precipitation for baseline study sites. Results clearly highlight the complementary relationship between water-year PPT, NDVI, and evaporative demand, and are consistent with regional vegetation index and complementary relationship studies. This work is supporting land and water managers for evaluation of GDEs with respect to climate, groundwater, and resource management.

Remote Sensing of Environment↗

USGS2010

Prairie wetland complexes as landscape functional units in a changing climate

The wetland complex is the functional ecological unit of the prairie pothole region (PPR) of central North America. Diverse complexes of wetlands contribute high spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity, productivity, and biodiversity to these glaciated prairie landscapes. Climatewarming simulations using the new model WETLANDSCAPE (WLS) project major reductions in water volume, shortening of hydroperiods, and less-dynamic vegetation for prairie wetland complexes. The WLS model portrays the future PPR as a much less resilient ecosystem: The western PPR will be too dry and the eastern PPR will have too few functional wetlands and nesting habitat to support historic levels of waterfowl and other wetland-dependent species. Maintaining ecosystem goods and services at current levels in a warmer climate will be a major challenge for the conservation community.

BioScience↗