Using Heat to Trace and Model the Surface Water-Groundwater Interactions:A Review

The great challenge is still to quantify the groundwater and surface water interaction after many years research.Due to recent advances in temperature sensing technologies and availability of relatively inexpensive temperature data loggers,groundwater temperature can be measured easily at low cost and in high frequencies.This allows heat to serve as a good groundwater tracer in studying groundwater and surface water interaction.The monitored temperatures in the surface water and the groundwaters can be used to trace the pattern of groundwater and river interaction.The temperature data can be also used as a supplementary to hydraulic data for model calibration when employing coupled groundwater flow and heat transport model and thus it could be helpful for further decreasing the model uncertainties.The coupled groundwater flow and heat transport model can be established and calibrated to 1) quantify the exchange of groundwater and surface water;2) delineate the flow paths and flow velocity in mixing zone;and 3) explore the mechanism controlling for groundwater and river exchange.Using heat as a tracer provides a new method for studying groundwater and river water interaction.