The Potential of Isotopic Tracers for Precise and Environmentally Clean Stream Discharge Measurements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Accurate discharge measurement is mandatory for any hydrological study. While the “velocity” measurement method is adapted to laminar flows, the “dilution” method is more appropriate for turbulent streams. As most low-gradient streams worldwide are neither laminar nor turbulent, a methodological gap appears. In this study, we demonstrate that the application of the “dilution” method to a low-gradient small stream gives very satisfactory results in addition to revealing surface/subsurface processes. A variety of chemical and isotopic tracers were injected into the stream (anions, fluorescent dyes, and chloride and hydrogen isotopes). We report the first use of 37Cl for stream discharge measurement and show that 37Cl and 2H can be reliably used as quantitative tracers. Discharge uncertainty calculations show that deuterium is the most accurate tracer method used. We also compare the differences in the tailing part of the restitution curves of tracers and investigate the role of transient surface and hyporheic zones in solute transport in light of a simple transport modelling approach. We conclude that isotopic tracers can be used as “environmentally friendly” tracers for discrete stream discharge measurements and that the application of multi-tracers tests in rivers opens the path to a better understanding of surface–subsurface interaction processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".