Ripple Effects: Bed Form Morphodynamics Cascading Into Hyporheic Zone Biogeochemistry

The water quality and ecosystem health of river corridors depend on the biogeochemical processes occurring in the hyporheic zones (HZs) of the beds and banks of rivers. HZs in riverbeds often form because of bed forms. Despite widespread and persistent variation in river flow, how the discharge‐ and grain size‐dependent geometry of bed forms and how bed form migration collectively and systematically affects hyporheic exchange flux, solute transport, and biogeochemical reaction rates are unknown. We investigated these linked processes through morphodynamically consistent multiphysics numerical simulation experiments. Several realistic ripple geometries based on bed form stability criteria using mean river flow velocity and median sediment grain size were designed. Ripple migration rates were estimated based primarily on the river velocity. The ripple geometries and migration rates were used to drive hyporheic flow and reactive transport models which quantified HZ nitrogen transformation. Results from fixed bed form simulations were compared with matching migrating bed form scenarios. We found that the turnover exchange due to ripple migration has a large impact on reactant supply and reaction rates. The nitrate removal efficiency increased asymptotically with Damköhler number for both mobile and immobile ripples, but the immobile ripple always had a higher nitrate removal efficiency. Since moving ripples remove less nitrogen, and may even be net nitrifying at times, consideration for bed form morphodynamics may therefore lead to reduction of model‐based estimates of denitrification. The connection between nitrate removal efficiency and Damköhler number can be integrated into frameworks for quantifying transient, network‐scale, HZ nitrate dynamics.