Thermal video recording while walking: A simple method for mapping
groundwater discharge points along forested headwater streams
Abstract
Groundwater discharge along channels can affect stream runoff,
chemistry, and ecological communities. Although the spatial distribution
of groundwater springs can be investigated by areal thermal remote
sensing of wide rivers, this technique is difficult to apply to forested
headwater streams because their channels are often covered by riparian
trees. We present a method of mapping groundwater springs for forested
headwater streams based on recording thermal video while walking along
channels. We applied this method at two sites in Hokkaido, Japan. At one
site, groundwater springs were spaced every ~100 m, and
their distribution did not follow the topography at a 1.3-km-long reach
underlain by Pleistocene andesite lava. Here, almost all of the springs
were colder than stream water and had similar chemistries to each other.
At the second site, cold and warm springs were underlain by Holocene
volcanic ash. The cold springs mainly seeped from the streambed at the
downstream part of the site while warm springs were located at the
footslope. Some cold springs had much higher solute concentrations than
the stream and warm springs, which suggests that the groundwater
discharge to the stream had multiple sources. We also used our method to
map the spatial heterogeneity of the stream temperature associated with
groundwater inputs. This method is suitable for wide-area surveys
because it can easily map the spatial distribution of the surface water
temperature and the groundwater discharge along headwater streams.