WATET - Water Age and Tracer Efficient Tracking

Water residence and transit time are crucial elements in flow pathways and catchment response characterization.

The temporal distribution of catchment transit times has been generally studied and modelled with lumped parameter approaches.

However, understanding the dominant controls in a more holistic manner requires attention to the spatially distributed catchment properties also in relation to their control on the basin response to different type of precipitation events.

A tool that looks both at the time and space distribution of water residence and transport can be useful for predicting water and solute fluxes and ultimately for better understanding the dependence of catchment transit and residence times on geomorphological and climatic factors.

This research develops a fully distributed process based watershed model coupled with a component to simulate solute transport. The tool would allow to simulate spatially-distributed water age and conservative tracer concentration and to explicitly compute transit time distributions for different precipitation events and locations.

Catchment transport processes in different climates and geomorphologies can therefore be explored.