Characterizing the Drivers of Intermittent Flow in Arctic Alaska Streams

Fish and wildlife species in the Arctic have developed life history strategies to deal with the extreme climate of the North. In the case of Arctic grayling, these strategies include long life, yearly spawning and migration.. In order to understand how such a species will be affected by a changing climate, we must first determine how these adaptive strategies may be at odds with the changing Arctic landscape. Arctic grayling migrate to spawning grounds just after spring break-up; then they migrate to feeding sites in early summer and finally in the fall migrate back to their overwintering sites. Low precipitation and high evapotranspiration rates during the summer can lead to low water levels and a fragmentation of the hydrologic landscape. This fragmentation creates a barrier to fish migration. The Kuparuk River is a perennial stream originating in the foothills of the Brooks Range on the North Slope of Alaska. The basin is underlain by continuous permafrost which essentially blocks the surface system from interacting with the subpermafrost groundwater system. Shallow subsurface flow occurs in the active layer, that area above permafrost which undergoes seasonal thawing in the summer. Sections of the Kuparuk are intermittent in that during low flows in the system these reaches appear dry (no flow in channel). Water reappears in the channel, downstream of these dry reaches, and it is believed that water continues to flow below the surface through the unfrozen thaw bulb beneath these reaches. These dry reaches act as summer barriers to fish migration within the Kuparuk River system. Previous research of this phenomenon sought to understand the location and timing of these dry events. The current research to be presented here attempts to determine the drivers of these dry channel events. Dye tracers and discharge measurements are used to determine the amount of hyporheic flow along these dry reaches and a statistical model incorporating soil moisture, precipitation and temperature is utilized to determine the extent to which subsurface and surface controls drive this phenomenon.