USING MULTIPLE METHODS TO EVALUATE GROUNDWATER – SURFACE WATER INTERACTION IN A STREAM

The connection between Oriskany Creek and an underlying alluvial aquifer used for municipal water supply has been previously studied using stream discharge measurements, short-term head measurements in monitoring wells, short-term fluctuations of major ion content of water in the stream and monitoring wells, and numerical modeling. Each method shows that pumping from municipal wells may induce infiltration from the stream, but the spatial and temporal extent of the groundwater – surface water exchange and the rates of flux are not known. We are using high-resolution streambed temperature profile measurements, coupled with the one-dimensional heat transport model VFLUX, to calculate the rate of vertical water flux between the stream and subsurface. The heat tracing results will be combined with earlier work to determine spatial and temporal rates and the extent of infiltration.