Watershed dynamics: Insights from the high-frequency chemical analysis of rivers

Our knowledge of the mechanisms of acquisition of inland water chemistry is limited by the frequency of sampling that can be carried out in the field. Sampling a river every 15 days means neglecting a variability in its composition that is beginning to be suspected and which informs processes or variations of short-term sources integrated over the entire catchment area. The automation of sampling and real-time measurement is an important challenge not only from the point of view of understanding the mechanisms controlling water chemistry, their temporal dynamics, the relations between concentrations and flows, but also from the point of view of applied for the detection of point pollution. This development is of interest to water professionals who are not yet legally constrained, but who could become so. As part of the CRITEX team project, a prototype of a chemical house called "RiverLab", a real laboratory for real-time field analysis, was developed and installed in November 2014 on the experimental watershed of Orgeval, a site studied for 50 years by the IRSTEA teams. This prototype is intended to be deployed on two other sites of the national watershed network (SOERE device). We focus on the two main natural forces that have undergone a watershed, namely precipitation inputs and solar energy revisited in terms of high frequency.