NUMERICAL MODELLING OF HEAT AND WATER TRANSFER IN PERMAFROST-DOMINATED WATERSHEDS

Laurent Orgogozo (1) , Oleg Pokrovsky (1) , Yves Godderis (2) , Jérôme Viers (1) , David Labat (1) , Anatoly Prokushkin

1 GET - Géosciences Environnement Toulouse
2 LMTG - Laboratoire des Mécanismes et Transfert en Géologie

This chapter deals with the thermo-hydrological determinants of weathering fluxes in boreal watersheds, and with the insights on this matter that may be expected from a mechanistic modelling approach. Focus will be placed on the weathering fluxes in the permafrost dominated watersheds of the basaltic region of the Putorana Plateau in Central Siberia, one of the largest and most pristine boreal forested areas (Pokrovsky et al., 2005). In the first part of this chapter a qualitative model of the thermo-hydrological functioning of the surfaces of the watersheds of this region will be presented. This qualitative model is based on quantitative geochemical measurements available in the literature (e.g. Pokrovsky et al., 2005, Prokushkin et al., 2007, Bagard et al., 2011). A discussion on the couplings between water and energy fluxes and matter fluxes is briefly presented. The importance of phase changes and advective transfers is emphasised. In the second part of this chapter, after a short review of published numerical tools dealing with the coupled transfer of water and energy in the active layer of permafrost areas, perspectives associated with the use of modern numerical techniques are discussed. A modelling efforts toward this direction is introduced, which has been initiated in the framework of OpenFOAM®, an open source tool box for computational fluid dynamics *

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation; Physique mathématique [math-ph]; Ingénierie de l'environnement; Interfaces continentales, environnement; Hydrologie; Glaciologie

Laurent Orgogozo, Oleg Pokrovsky, Yves Godderis, Jérôme Viers, David Labat, et al.. NUMERICAL MODELLING OF HEAT AND WATER TRANSFER IN PERMAFROST-DOMINATED WATERSHEDS. Permafrost: Distribution, Composition and Impacts on Infrastructure and Ecosystems, 2014. ⟨hal-01881771⟩