Shallow groundwater level time series and a groundwater chemistry survey from a boreal headwater catchment

• Main Authors: Erdbrügger, Jana, Meerveld, Ilja, Seibert, Jan, Bishop, Kevin
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Northern Sweden
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2022-114; https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2022-114/

Groundwater can respond quickly to precipitation and is the main contribution to streamflow in most catchments in humid, temperate climates. To better understand shallow groundwater dynamics in a boreal headwater catchment, we installed a network of groundwater wells in two areas in the Krycklan catchment in Northern Sweden: a small headwater catchment (3.5 ha, 54 wells) and a hillslope (1 ha, 21 wells). The average wells depth was 274 cm (range: 70–581 cm) and recorded the groundwater level variation at a 10–30 min interval between 18. July 2018–1. November 2020. Manual water level measurements (0–26 per well) during the summer seasons in 2018 and 2019 were used to confirm and re-calibrate the water level logger results. The groundwater level data for each well was carefully processed and quality controlled, using six data labels. The absolute and relative positions of the wells were measured with a high-precision GPS and terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) to determine differences in groundwater levels and thus groundwater gradients. During the summer of 2019, all wells with sufficient water were sampled and analyzed for electrical conductivity, pH, absorbance, anion and cation concentrations, as well as δ18O and δ2H. This combined hydrometric and hydrochemical dataset can be useful to test models that simulate groundwater dynamics and to evaluate subsurface hydrological connectivity. We therefore made the data available on https://www.safedeposit.se/projects/82 (Erdbrügger et al., 2022).