T157 Advances in Understanding at the Groundwater–Surface Water Interface and Challenges for the Future: A Reflection on Tom Winter’s Legacy

Tuesday, 11 October 2011
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room M101AB

TOM WINTER'S INFLUENCE ON THE MODERN UNDERSTANDING OF WETLAND HYDRODYNAMICS

Paper number: T157-9
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 10:00 AM – 10:15 AM

Authors

Abstract

Tom Winter’s contributions on lake and groundwater interactions profoundly influenced how wetland scientists now view the hydrology of wetlands. Winter’s seminal heuristic numerical simulations in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s showing groundwater-lake interactions at multiple spatial scales led to analogous heuristic explorations on bog hydrology in the 1980’s. Thereafter, wetland hydrologists and ecologists used Winter’s approach of merging of numerical experiments and rigorous field studies to explore groundwater-wetland surface-water interactions. Collectively, these wetland studies show how wetland ecological succession closely links to groundwater hydraulics, in part driven by the biota itself. For example, water-table mounds under raised bogs in Minnesota peatlands generate local flow systems that deliver mineral-rich groundwater to their sides and lead to ecological change. Accumulation of bog peat, in this case, leads to the topographic mounding and hydrodynamic changes.

The “Winter” approach to wetland study also has been used to explore fen hydrodynamics near large lakes and ecological succession and hydrodynamics in kettle bogs. Winter personally extended his lake work into wetlands, notably in the Prairie Pothole region of the upper Midwest. There, he and colleagues identified how phreatophytes influence water table hydrodynamics. Finally, Winter’s climatic and geomorphic classification of the landscape contributed to modern wetland classification used broadly by regulatory agencies. Winter’s template for doing science consisted consistently of coupling field scale studies to continually test the results of his heuristic numerical and other modeling experiment. Only by doing this, was Winter able to place climatic and hydrologic responses to multiple drivers into proper context. Winter once said that “you need to study a place for a while to start asking the right questions,” an approach all hydrologist might consider in their own research.