Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Hydrology
A Conversational Intelligent Assistant for Enhanced Operational Support in Floodplain Management with Multimodal Data
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Floodplain management is crucial for mitigating flood risks and enhancing community resilience, yet floodplain managers often face significant challenges, including the complexity of data analysis, regulatory compliance, and effective communication with diverse stakeholders. This study introduces Floodplain Manager AI, an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) based virtual assistant designed to [...]
Groundwater connected art: practicing arts-based research to enrich how hydrogeology engages people, place and other disciplines
Published: 2024-12-12
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Hydrology, Other Geography
Groundwater depletion, contamination, and governance challenges persist despite decades of groundwater research. Scientific methods are crucial yet seem insufficient to inspire the deep emotional and cultural connections needed for real change – groundwater challenges and opportunities are not reaching enough hearts and minds. This article calls for a bold shift: integrating arts-based research [...]
Functional regression for space-time prediction of precipitation-induced shallow landslides in South Tyrol, Italy
Published: 2024-12-10
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Multivariate Analysis, Statistical Models
Shallow landslides are geomorphic hazards in mountainous terrains across the globe. Their occurrence can be attributed to the interplay of static and dynamic landslide controls. In previous studies, data-driven approaches have been employed to model shallow landslides on a regional scale, focusing on analyzing the spatial aspects and time-varying conditions separately. Still, the joint assessment [...]
Disappearance of Homo floresiensis from Liang Bua alongside seasonal aridification of Flores 61,000-47,000 years ago
Published: 2024-12-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Fresh Water Studies, Geochemistry, Hydrology, Paleobiology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Speleology
The cause of the disappearance of the primitive hominin, Homo floresiensis, from the Indonesian island of Flores ~50,000 years ago is a key question in palaeoanthropology. The potential roles of human agency and climate change continue to be debated, but the history of freshwater availability critical to survival at the type locality, Liang Bua, remains unknown. Although speleothem 18O is used [...]
Tracking Drought Impacts from Texts: Towards AI-Assisted Drought Impact Detection
Published: 2024-12-07
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology
Drought is recognized for its extensive and varied impacts. Based on the drought-related textual datasets from the National Drought Mitigation Center, our research applies advanced artificial intelligence techniques, including deep learning and natural language processing, to enhance the monitoring of multifaceted drought impacts in the United States. This study also delves into predicting [...]
Modelling glacier mass balance and runoff in the Kaskawulsh River headwaters of southwest Yukon, Canada, 1980-2022
Published: 2024-11-30
Subjects: Glaciology, Hydrology
The highly-glacierized headwaters of the Kaskawulsh River are home to 9% of all glacier ice in Yukon, Canada, have been losing glacier mass at regionally representative rates, and were the source of a sudden meltwater-rerouting event in 2016 that has had significant downstream consequences. We use an enhanced temperature-index melt model driven by downscaled and bias-corrected climate reanalysis [...]
A decadal survey of the near-surface seismic velocity response to hydrological variations in Utah, United States
Published: 2024-11-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geophysics and Seismology, Hydrology
Ongoing climate change leads to an increase in prolonged drought and severe weather events in the United States, particularly pronounced in semi-arid regions such as the western United States. It could have lasting social and environmental impacts. Continuous monitoring of near-surface hydrological processes and groundwater resources will provide helpful information for effective water resource [...]
Flooding, nonlinear dynamics and Jensen’s inequality: Analyzing the damping and amplification of inundation extent with river discharge nonstationarity
Published: 2024-11-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Hydrology, Risk Analysis
Controls on coastal saline groundwater across North America
Published: 2024-10-18
Subjects: Hydrology
Groundwater is crucial to sustaining coastal freshwater needs. About 32 million people in the coastal USA rely on groundwater as their primary water source. With rapidly growing coastal communities and increasing demands for fresh groundwater, understanding controls of continental-scale coastal groundwater salinity is critical. To investigate what hydrogeological factors (e.g., topography, [...]
Groundwater use to reduce natural hazard susceptibilities and inequities in the metacrisis
Published: 2024-09-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Long-term thinking is broadly advocated for groundwater - the largest available freshwater resource that is essential for drinking water, irrigation and ecosystems around the world. Long-term thinking is crucial to support sustainability of this slowly renewed resource, but here we propose another crucial, novel and emerging approach for groundwater: short-term use over days and months during or [...]
High-resolution geophysical monitoring of moisture accumulation preceding slope movement – a path to improved early warning
Published: 2024-09-26
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Hydrology
Slope failures are an ongoing global threat leading to significant numbers of fatalities and infrastructure damage. Landslide impact on communities can be reduced using efficient early warning systems to plan mitigation measures and protect elements at risk. This manuscript presents an innovative geophysical approach to monitoring landslide dynamics, which combines Electrical Resistivity [...]
Challenges and opportunities of ML and explainable AI in large-sample hydrology
Published: 2024-09-09
Subjects: Hydrology
Machine learning (ML) is a powerful tool for hydrological modelling, prediction, dataset generation, model interpretation, and process discovery. As such, ML has become integral to the field of large-sample hydrology, where hundreds to thousands of river catchments are included within a single ML model to capture diverse hydrological behaviours and improve model generalisability. This manuscript [...]
A Preliminary Analysis of Landsat Surface-Reflectance Data from Torch Lake in Antrim County, Michigan, from 1984 to 2023
Published: 2024-09-06
Subjects: Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology
This report describes an investigation of visible light reflectances from Torch Lake in Antrim County, Michigan. The oligotrophic lake is the largest inland lake in Michigan by volume and the second largest by surface area. Local residents have expressed concern that a recent, on-going proliferation of golden-brown algae may be impacting the water quality and aesthetics of the lake. This report [...]
The extended Global Lake area, Climate, and Population (GLCP) dataset: Extending the GLCP to include ice, snow, and radiation-related climate variables
Published: 2024-08-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
A changing climate and increasing human population necessitate understanding global freshwater availability. To enable assessment of lake water variability from local-to-global and monthly-to-decadal scales, we extended the Global Lake area, Climate, and Population (GLCP) dataset, which contains monthly lake surface area for 1.42 million lakes with paired basin-level climate and population data [...]
On weighted ensembles of streamflow: bias correct separately and prefer constrained weights for more reliable and predictable outputs
Published: 2024-08-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Statistical Models, Water Resource Management
It has become more and more common in hydrology to consider multiple estimates of hydrological variables – ensembles – over single model runs. Ensemble members represent different realisations of various model structures, input data, and/or parametrisations. Improved predictions can be made using weighted ensembles with wide variety of model averaging methods found in the literature, but only a [...]