Enhancing water management in Northern European lowland chalk streams: A parsimonious, high-resolution hydrological model using groundwater level as a proxy for baseflow

Study region

The River Frome, a chalk stream in West Dorset, UK.

Study focus

High-resolution hydrological models are required to integrate with the current wave of high-frequency data and advance our understanding of pollutant sources, pathways, and sinks. This presents several challenges in chalk streams, as their high-permeability and unique hydrogeological characteristics often leads to complex models that are overparameterized and computationally burdensome. In this article, we develop a novel and parsimonious modelling approach to describe the surface hydrology for a chalk stream in high resolution (15-minute frequency, ≤ 100 m cross-section spacing), using groundwater levels as a proxy for spring discharges.

New hydrological insights for the region

Our results show that chalk stream dry-weather flows can be simulated accurately and parsimoniously at high-resolution (Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency = 0.97, mean relative error = 2.86 %, for a five-year period). We also show that spring discharges are the dominant form of flow accretion in all seasons and are critical to dilute sewage treatment inputs during the ecological growing season, whilst runoff and quick-flow pathways in the river valley corridor contribute a small proportion to annual flow accretion (< 5.2 %). Due to its simplicity and few parameters to calibrate, this modelling approach has broad applicability in lowland permeable catchments. Management implications include expeditious investigations of high-resolution freshwater quality responses to pollution and informing abstraction limits to sustain robust ecological conditions.