Temperature effects on nitrogen cycling and nitrate removal-production efficiency in bed form-induced hyporheic zones

Hyporheic flow in aquatic sediment controls solute and heat transport thereby mediating the fate of nutrients and contaminants, dissolved oxygen, and temperature in the hyporheic zone ( HZ). We conducted a series of numerical simulations of hyporheic processes within a dune with different uniform temperatures, coupling turbulent open channel fluid flow, porous fluid flow, and reactive solute transport to study the temperature dependence of nitrogen source/sink functionality and its efficiency. Two cases were considered: a polluted stream and a pristine stream. Sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate the influence of stream water [NO3-]/[NH4+]. The simulations showed that in both cases warmer temperatures resulted in shallower denitrification zones and oxic-anoxic zone boundaries, but the trend of net denitrification rate and nitrate removal or production efficiency of the HZ for these two cases differed. For both cases, at high [NO3-]/[NH4+], the HZ functioned as a NO3- sink with the nitrate removal efficiency increasing with temperature. But at low [NO3-]/[NH4+] for the polluted stream, the HZ is a NO3- sink at low temperature but then switches to a NO3- source at warmer temperatures. For the pristine stream case, the HZ was always a NO3- source, with the NO3- production efficiency increasing monotonically with temperature. In addition, although the interfacial fluid flux expectedly increased with increasing temperature due to decreasing fluid viscosity, the total nitrate flux into the HZ did not follow this trend. This is because when HZ nitrification is high, uniformly elevated [NO3-] lowers dispersive fluxes into the HZ. We found that there are numerous confounding and interacting factors that combined to lead to the final temperature dependence of N transformation reaction rates. Although the temperature effect on the rate constant can be considered as the dominant factor, simply using the Arrhenius equation to predict the reaction rate would lead to incomplete insight by ignoring the changes in interfacial fluid and solute fluxes and reaction zone areas. Our study shows that HZ temperature and stream [NO3-]/[NH4+] are key controls for HZ sink/source functions.