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The current generation of catchment travel time distribution (TTD) research, integrating nearly three decades of work since publication of Water's Journey from Rain to Stream, seeks to represent the full distribution in catchment travel times and its temporal variability. Here, we compare conceptualizations of increasing complexity with regards to mixing of water storages and evaluate how these assumptions influence time-variable TTD estimates for two catchments with contrasting climates: the Gårdsjön catchment in Sweden and the Marshall Gulch catchment in Arizona, USA. Our results highlight that, as long as catchment TTDs cannot be measured directly but need to be inferred from input-output signals of catchments, the inferred catchment TTDs depend strongly on the underlying assumptions of mixing within a catchment. Furthermore, we found that the conceptualization of the evapotranspiration flux strongly influences the inferred travel times of stream discharge. For the wet and forested Gårdsjön catchment in Sweden, we inferred that evapotranspiration most likely resembles a completely mixed sample of the water stored in the catchment; however, for the drier Marshall Gulch catchment in Arizona, evapotranspiration predominantly contained the younger water stored in the catchment. For the Marshall Gulch catchment, this higher probability for young water in evapotranspiration resulted in older water in the stream compared to travel times inferred with assumptions of complete mixing. New observations that focus on the TTD of the evapotranspiration flux and the actual travel time of water through a catchment are necessary to improve identification of mixing and consequently travel times of stream water. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this study was to evaluate regionalisation methods that could be used for modelling catchment inflows into Lake Victoria. WASMOD, a conceptual water balance model, was applied to nine gauged sub-basins in Lake Victoria basin in order to test the transferability of model parameters between the basins using three regionalisation approaches. Model calibration was carried out within the GLUE (generalised likelihood uncertainty estimation) framework for uncertainty assessment. The analysis was carried out for the period 1967-2000. Parameter transferability was assessed by comparing the likelihood values of regionalised simulations with the values under calibration for each basin. WASMOD performed well for all study sub-basins with Nash-Sutcliffe values ranging between 0.70 and 0.82. Transferability results were mixed. For the proxy-basin method, the best performing parameter donor basin was Mara with four proxy basins giving acceptable results. Sio, Sondu, Gucha and Duma also performed well. The global mean method gave acceptable performance for seven of the nine study basins. The ensemble regionalisation method provides the possibility to consider parameter uncertainty in the regionalisation. Ensemble regionalisation method performed best with an average departure of 40% from the observed mean annual flows compared to 48 and 60% for proxy-basin and global mean methods, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate groundwater transit times and flow paths in shallow till soil, within an acidification study at Gardsjon, Sweden, two lineinjections of 36Cl and 3H were made in groundwater during 1992. The first injection in January, when the two tracers were injected at the same depth, gave tracer transit times from injection line to outlet of some hours due to a runoff event on the first day. The subsequent recession period left a considerable amount of tracer in the unsaturated zone, which had transit times that ranged from weeks to months. Tracer recovery at the outlet was 78% for 3H and 47% for 36Cl. Cl retention was indicated. The second injection in November, when 3H was injected at 30 cm depth and 36Cl at 60 cm depth, gave recoveries of 96% for 3H and 83% for 36Cl. Apart from an advective flow-dependent tracer transport, very fast tracer pulses occurred. The velocities for those pulses were of the order of tens of metres perhour. Highest tracer concentrations were observed in the superficialsoil layers, which suggest that these layers were the dominant flow paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]