A review on groundwater-surface water interaction highlighting the significance of streambed and aquifer properties on the exchanging flux

Quantification of groundwater (GW) and surface water (SW) interactions is crucial for effective water resource allocation and management. Immense progress has been made in the past few decades to address the different aspects of GW-SW exchanges. These have resulted in a large volume of literature. This work reviews in detail the mechanism of interaction and the applications of different field and modelling techniques. The review of flux quantification methods identifies the streambed and the aquifer beneath as two major components affecting the interactions. It is observed that the streambed is highly idealised in modelling studies, and the significance of aquifer properties in the flux quantification is found to be less emphasised. Therefore, attempts are made to highlight the potential significance of both streambed and the aquifer properties through a 2D numerical experiment. Using a superimposed GW-SW system and appropriately grouping the system parameters (as hydraulic and geometric), the experiment shows that the aquifer properties can dominate exchanging flux under certain conditions, e.g., at higher streambed conductance. The work provides suggestions to modify the widely used Darcy's approach to include aquifer properties.