Project funded by the France-Berkeley Fund

The France-Berkeley Fund aims to support innovative research collaborations between universities or research institutes from Berkeley and France. As such, they decided to support a project on "Tracer-informed critical zone modelling to connect water ages with hydrological resources and solute exports" that Sylvain Kuppel and I had proposed. Our goal is to address these three research questions: 
(1) How do spatially- and temporally- variable water ages of CZ compartments within the catchment relate to the observed dynamics of stream concentration-discharge (C-Q) relationships?
(2) Which role does subsurface connectivity of heterogeneous flow paths play for water storage and fluxes?
(3) How does this hydrological heterogeneity drive water-rock interactions and solute export on the sub-catchment scale?
We will use the extensive data sets we gather within the DOE funded Watershed SFA in the East River, Colorado to inform the isotope enabled EcH2O-iso model. The storage and flux dynamics will then be coupled to the spatially-distributed chemical weathering model pyWITCH3D.