GW/SW-MST: A Groundwater/Surface-Water Method Selection Tool

The Groundwater/Surface-Water Method Selection Tool (GW/SW-MST) is a spreadsheet-based tool to help practitioners identify methods for use in groundwater/surface-water (GW/SW) exchange and hyporheic studies.

GW/SW exchange and hyporheic processes are topics receiving increasing attention from the hydrologic community. Hydraulic, chemical, temperature, geophysical, and remote sensing methods are used to achieve various goals (e.g., inference of GW/SW exchange, mapping of bed materials, etc.), but the application of these methods is constrained by site conditions (e.g., water depth, bed material, etc.). Researchers and environmental professionals working on GW/SW problems come from diverse fields and rarely have expertise in all available field methods; hence there is a need for guidance to design field campaigns and select methods that both contribute to study goals and are likely to work under site-specific conditions. Here, we present the spreadsheet-based GW/SW-Method Selection Tool (GW/SW-MST) to help practitioners identify methods for use in GW/SW and hyporheic studies. The GW/SW-MST is a Microsoft Excel-based decision support tool in which the user selects answers to questions about GW/SW-related study goals and site parameters/characteristics. Based on user input, the tool indicates which methods from a toolbox of 32 methods could potentially contribute to achieving the specified goals at the site described.