[en] To investigate the effects of flow rate variation on solute transport in a karst conduit, three pipe structures of a constant diameter pipe, the pipe connected to a symmetrical pool and an asymmetrical pool respectively were chosen, and several tracer experiments were conducted separately in each of the three pipe structures at nine flow rates. Experimental results show that the peak of the breakthrough curve (BTC) increased and the tailing decreased with increasing discharge. Three models, the advection–dispersion equation (ADE), the two-region nonequilibrium model (TRNM) and the transient storage model (TSM), were used to simulate BTCs and explore the change of transport parameters with increasing flow rate. Simulations show that ADE was capable of replicating the almost symmetrical BTCs of the single pipe but incapable of fitting the appreciable BTC tails for the pools. Nevertheless, TRNM and TSM can reproduce all BTCs of single pipe and pipe with a pool very well. The research demonstrates the significant effect of the pool on solute transport. The parameters in the two models (TRNM and TSM) exhibited similar trends with increasing discharge in either pool. In the TRNM, a clear positive correlation with discharge emerged for the partition coefficient and mass transfer coefficient. Meanwhile, the main channel cross-sectional area and exchange coefficient in TSM increased gradually with discharge. The storage zone area decreased generally with increasing flow rate. The relationship between solute transport and the flow rate is more complex in the asymmetrical pool than in the symmetrical pool.

[en] Multi-model frameworks are widely used to identify the appropriate model structure for the study catchment. However, most frameworks mainly consider the process complexity of the model, and few of them consider the spatial complexity. In this paper, we investigated the appropriate model structure for a karst catchment from the aspect of spatial complexity. The purpose is twofold: (1) to investigate whether the spatial complexity is needed to simulate the spring discharge of this karst catchment and (2) to investigate whether the increase of model’s spatial complexity can make up its deficiency on the process complexity. Three simple lumped models with different process complexities were chosen to gradually increase the spatial heterogeneity of their parameters to investigate the appropriate model structure for simulating the discharge of a karst spring. The results show that the performances of three lumped models highly improve when adding the routing function to them. However, further considering the spatial parameter heterogeneity, only one model shows obvious performance improvement and other two models show limited improvement. Moreover, this model with relatively complex spatial parameter heterogeneity still shows worse performance than another lumped model. This indicates an increase of models’ spatial complexity cannot always make up their process deficiencies. The final comparison results indicated that the lumped model or their semi-lumped version with flexible process complexity is enough to simulate the discharge of this karst spring and no extra spatial complexity is needed. Our studies also indicated that the increase in spatial complexity of the model cannot always fully compensate its deficiency in process complexity.