Identification of the contributing area to river discharge during low-flow period

The increasing severity of hydrological droughts in the Mediterranean basin related to climate change raises the need to understand the processes sustaining low-flow. The purpose of this paper is to trial simple mixing model approaches first to identify and then quantify streamflow contribution during low-water periods. An approach based on the coupling of geochemical data with hydrological data allows quantifying flow contributions. In complement, monitoring during the low water period was used to investigate the drying up the trajectory of each geological reservoir individually. Data were collected during the summer of 2018 and 2019 on a Mediterranean river (Gardon de Sainte Croix). The identification of the end-members was performed after the identification of groundwater geochemical signature clustered according to the geological nature of the reservoir. Two complementary methods validate further the characterisation: rock leaching experiments and unsupervised classification (k-means). The use of G-EMMA mixing model coupled with hydrological monitoring of the main river discharge rate shows major disparities in the contribution of the geological units, showing a reservoir with a minor contribution in high flow becoming preponderant during the low-flow period. This finding revealed to be of the utmost importance for managing water resources during the dry period