Stream restoration has been advocated as a key strategy to restore the ecosystem functioning of degraded stream systems, mitigate excess nutrient concentrations and reduce export to downstream recipients. Specifically small agricultural streams are suitable for such restoration efforts due their disproportionate contribution to downstream nutrient loading and their large proportion of the total stream network length. However, large-scale assessments of both the current removal efficiencies in and the enhancement potential of these streams are generally lacking. Here, we used a physically based model framework supported by an extensive dataset to simulate the transport and removal of nitrogen (N) in all local agricultural streams in Sweden, equivalent to 70,000 km or 33.5% of the total mapped stream network. The framework assumed that N removal occurred predominantly by denitrification in the hyporheic zone and was utilized to quantify the current and potential removal as well as to assess the limiting conditions in terms of Damköhler numbers. The removal rates were shown to be highly variable with location, but the aggregated results indicated that the current removal for all assessed reaches was 13.1, 0.1 and 37.6% of their load during mean (MQ), mean high (MHQ) and mean low discharge (MLQ) conditions, respectively. The theoretical potential of N removal, i.e., the aggregated removal under the assumption of optimal hyporheic conditions was estimated to be 15.4, 1.9 and 62.1% during MQ, MHQ and MLQ, respectively. The study also comprised a detailed investigation along one single stream reach that displayed the ability of engineered restoration actions to alter the hyporheic residence times and, in the end, the hyporheic N-removal during different discharge conditions. Overall, our results indicated that in-stream restoration efforts aiming to enhance hyporheic functioning in small agricultural streams had a high potential to reduce terrestrial N export, especially if implemented over larger areas.

Weather climate fluctuations cause large variations in renewable electricity production, which requires substantial amounts of energy storage to overcome energy drought periods. Based on daily hydroclimatic data and information about renewable power systems covering Europe, here we quantify the complementarity in the solar-wind-hydro energy components of the continental climate system. We show that the spatiotemporal management of renewable electricity production over Europe can induce a virtual energy storage gain that is several times larger than the available energy storage capacity in hydropower reservoirs. The potential electricity production matches the consumption by spatiotemporal management of suitable shares of solar and wind power complemented with the present hydropower. While the mixed renewable energy potential varies less than anticipated at the continental scale, utilization of the complementarity requires new continental electrical transmission lines and stable international trade. We highlight that management models need to consider incentives beyond national boundaries to appropriately benefit from continental climate conditions.

Excess CO<inf>2</inf> accumulated in soils is typically transported to the atmosphere through molecular diffusion along a concentration gradient. Because of the slow and constant nature of this process, a steady state between peat CO<inf>2</inf> production and emissions is often established. However, in peatland ecosystems, high peat porosity could foster additional non-diffusive transport processes, whose dynamics may become important to peat CO<inf>2</inf> storage, transport and emission. Based on a continuous record of in situ peat pore CO<inf>2</inf> concentration within the unsaturated zone of a raised bog in southern Canada, we show that changes in wind speed create large diel fluctuations in peat pore CO<inf>2</inf> store. Peat CO<inf>2</inf> builds up overnight and is regularly flushed out the following morning. Persistently high wind speed during the day maintains the peat CO<inf>2</inf> with concentrations close to that of the ambient air. At night, wind speed decreases and CO<inf>2</inf> production overtakes the transport rate leading to the accumulation of CO<inf>2</inf> in the peat. Our results indicate that the effective diffusion coefficient fluctuates based on wind speed and generally exceeds the estimated molecular diffusion coefficient. The balance between peat CO<inf>2</inf> accumulation and transport is most dynamic within the range of 0–2 m s⁻¹ wind speeds, which occurs over 75% of the growing season and dominates night-time measurements. Wind therefore drives considerable temporal dynamics in peat CO<inf>2</inf> transport and storage, particularly over sub-daily timescales, such that peat CO<inf>2</inf> emissions can only be directly related to biological production over longer timescales.

Hydropower is the largest source of renewable energy in the world and currently dominates flexible electricity production capacity. However, climate variations remain major challenges for efficient production planning, especially the annual forecasting of periodically variable inflows and their effects on electricity generation. This study presents a model that assesses the impact of forecast quality on the efficiency of hydropower operations. The model uses ensemble forecasting and stepwise linear optimisation combined with receding horizon control to simulate runoff and the operation of a cascading hydropower system. In the first application, the model framework is applied to the Dalalven River basin in Sweden. The efficiency of hydropower operations is found to depend significantly on the linkage between the representative biannual hydrologic regime and the regime actually realised in a future scenario. The forecasting error decreases when considering periodic hydroclimate fluctuations, such as the dry-wet year variability evident in the runoff in the Dalalven River, which ultimately increases production efficiency by approximately 2% (at its largest), as is shown in scenarios 1 and 2. The corresponding potential hydropower production is found to vary by 80 GWh/year. The reduction in forecasting error when considering biennial periodicity corresponds to a production efficiency improvement of about 0.33% (or 13.2 GWh/year).

Significant attention has been given to hyporheic water fluxes induced by hydromorphologic processes in streambeds and the effects they have on stream ecology. However, the impact of hyporheic fluxes on regional groundwater flow discharge zones as well as the interaction of these flows are much less investigated. The groundwater-hyporheic interactive flow not only governs solute mass and heat transport in streams but also controls the retention of solute and contamination following the discharge of deep groundwater, such as naturally occurring solutes and leakage from geological waste disposal facilities. Here, we applied a physically based modeling approach combined with extensive hydrologic, geologic and geographical data to investigate the effect of hyporheic flow on groundwater discharge in the Krycklan catchment, located in a boreal landscape in Sweden. Regional groundwater modeling was conducted using COMSOL Multiphysics by considering geologic heterogeneity and infiltration constraint of the groundwater circulation intensity. Moreover, the hyporheic flow was analyzed using an exact spectral solution accounting for the fluctuating streambed topography and superimposed with the regional groundwater flow. By comparing the discharge flow fields with and without consideration of hyporheic flows, we found that the divergence of the discharge was substantially enhanced and the distribution of the travel times of groundwater was significantly shifted toward shorter times due to the presence of hyporheic flow. Particularly important is that the groundwater flow paths contract near the streambed interface due to the hyporheic flow, which leads to a phenomenon that we name “fragmentation” of coherent areas of groundwater upwelling in pinhole-shaped stream tubes.

As a part of the overall safety assessment for a geological disposal of radioactive waste, models for different ecosystems are used to evaluate doses to humans and biota from possible radionuclide discharges to the biosphere. In previous safety assessments, transport modelling of radionuclides in running waters such as streams has been much simplified to the extent that only dilution of the inflow of radionuclides has been considered with no regard of any other interactions.Hyporheic exchange flow (HEF) is the flow of surface water in streams that enters the subsurface zone and, after some time, returns to the surface. HEF has been studied for decades. Hyporheic exchange and the residence time in the hyporheic zone are key parameters controlling the transport of radionuclides in a stream. Further-more, recent studies have shown that HEF can reduce the groundwater upwelling area and increase the up -welling velocity in areas closest to the streambed water interface.In this paper, the development of an assessment model describing radionuclide transport with consideration of HEF and deep groundwater upwelling along streams is presented. An approach to parameterising the hyporheic exchange processes into an assessment model is based on a comprehensive study that has been performed in five different Swedish catchments. Sensitivity analyses are performed to explore the effect with consideration of the inflow of radionuclides with regard to HEF and deep groundwater upwelling in a safety assessment perspective. Finally, we include some suggestions for the application of the assessment model to long-term radiological safety assessments.

Hyporheic exchange flow (HEF) at the streambed–water interface (SWI) has been shown to impact the pattern and rate of discharging groundwater flow (GWF) and the consequential transport of heat, solutes and contaminants from the subsurface into streams. However, the control of geographic and hydromorphological catchment characteristics on GWF–HEF interactions is still not fully understood. Here, the spatial variability in flow characteristics in discharge zones was investigated and averaged over three spatial scales in five geographically different catchments in Sweden. Specifically, the deep GWF discharge velocity at the SWI was estimated using steady-state numerical models, accounting for the real multiscale topography and heterogeneous geology, while an analytical model, based on power spectral analysis of the streambed topography and statistical assessments of the stream hydraulics, was used to estimate the HEF. The modeling resulted in large variability in deep GWF and HEF velocities, both within and between catchments, and a regression analysis was performed to explain this observed variability by using a set of independent variables representing catchment topography and geology as well as local stream hydromorphology. Moreover, the HEF velocity was approximately two orders of magnitude larger than the deep GWF velocity in most of the investigated stream reaches, indicating significant potential to accelerate the deep GWF velocity and reduce the discharge areas. The greatest impact occurred in catchments with low average slope and in reaches close to the catchment outlet, where the deep GWF discharge velocity was generally low.

Artificial tracers are often used for quantitative estimates of solute transport properties in rivers. However, single-injection tracer tests give insights in transport characteristics limited to the ecohydrological conditions at the testing time. Series of time-consuming and laborious tracer tests would be required to properly capture seasonal changes. The present study uses intrinsic diurnal fluctuations of electrical conductivity (EC) caused by discharge of treated wastewater as a tracer to evaluate solute transport processes along a 4.7-km reach of the River Erpe, Germany. By reproducing the fluctuations recorded along the river using the solute transport model one-dimensional transport with inflow and storage, this study investigated the long-term dynamics in solute transport properties. Individual 48-hr curves of EC were used in the steady state configuration of the model to gain 48-hr-integrated estimates of selected transport parameters. Using a sliding window approach in 1-hr steps along the 2,270-hr time series of EC the temporal variability of solute transport between April and June 2016 was assessed. To test the identifiability of parameters using the proposed method, sensitivity analyses and a breakthrough curve analysis of selected 48-hr windows were implemented. With time advancing into the summer, a significant rising trend (Mann-Kendall test p-value < 0.05) of the cross sectional area of the channel was observed and attributed to the growth of macrophytes and a significant slightly decreasing trend for the storage rate was found. The presented method is of high value for river management, as promoting transient storage enhances biogeochemical cycling and benefits water quality.

New tools are needed to evaluate the impacts of short-term hydropower regulation practices on downstream river systems and to progress towards sustainable river-flow management. As hydropower is increasingly being used to balance the energy load deficit caused by other less flexible sources, sub-daily flow conditions across many regulated river (RR) systems are changing. To address this, we used wavelet analyses to quantify the discharge variability in RRs and categorized the level of variability based on the conditions in natural free-flowing rivers. The presented framework used the definition of fluvial connectivity (Grill et al., 2019) to identify free-flowing rivers used in the study. We tested the developed framework in 12 different RRs in Finland and found higher overall averaged sub-daily variations, with up to 20 times larger variability than natural conditions. A large, highly regulated Finnish river system was found to have the highest sub-daily variations in winter, while smaller RRs with lower levels of regulation the highest variations in summer. The proposed framework offers a novel tool for sustainable river management and can be easily applied to various rivers and regions globally. It had flexibility to analyze sub-daily variations in desired seasonal or other ecologically sensitive periods.

Hyporheic exchange flow (HEF) can generally be quantified through two different approaches. The first approach, which is deductive, entails physically based models, supported with relevant observations. The second approach includes inductive assessments of stream tracer tests using solute transport models, which provide a useful mathematical framework that allows for upscaling of results, but included parameters often have a vague physical base, which limits the possibilities of generalizing results using independent hydromorphological observations. To better understand how the physical basis of HEF-quantifying parameters relates to stream hydromorphology at different spatial scales, we cross-validated the results from (a) tracer test assessments using a 1D solute transport model that accounts for HEF and (b) an independent hydromechanical model that represents HEF driven by multiscale pressure gradients along the streambed interface. To parameterize the models, topographical surveys, tracer tests, and streambed hydraulic conductivity measurements were performed in 10 stream reaches, differing in terms of geomorphology, slope, and discharge. The results show that the models were cross-validated in terms of the average exchange velocity, providing a plausible physical explanation for this parameter in small alluvial streams with low discharges, shallow depth, and moderate slopes. However, the hydromechanical model generally resulted in wider residence time distributions and occasionally higher average residence times compared to the tracer test assessments. From the cross-validated multiscale hydromechanical model, we learned that water surface profile variations were the main drivers of HEF in all investigated streams and that spatial scales between 20 cm and 5 m dominated the estimated HEF velocity.