Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Hydrology
Enhancing the Normalized Difference Water Index for Improved Urban Flood Detection
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resource Economics, Other Earth Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Accurate urban flood detection is crucial for effective disaster management and urban planning. Traditional indices like the Normalized Difference Water Index and Modified Normalized Difference Water Index often produce inaccurate results due to spectral confusion in urban areas and sensitivity to shadows. Moreover, MNDWI's reliance on the Shortwave Infrared band limits its use with certain [...]
How to deal w___ missing input data
Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Deep learning hydrologic models have made their way from research to applications. More and more national hydrometeorological agencies, hydro power operators, and engineering consulting companies are building Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models for operational use cases. All of these efforts come across similar sets of challenges—challenges that are different from those in controlled scientific [...]
Embracing Large Language Model (LLM) Technologies in Hydrology Research
Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology
The growing complexity of hydrological systems necessitates innovative approaches to data management, knowledge management, and model development. Large Language Models (LLMs) have great potential to revolutionize hydrological research by unifying and advancing these three critical aspects. In this perspective work, we review recent advances and applications of LLMs and exemplify using LLMs in [...]
Modern Cave Monitoring Informs Interpretations of Past Climate Change: Applications to Titan Cave, Wyoming
Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Speleology
Monitoring of cave environments is an essential process for deciphering records of past climate change preserved in the geochemical composition of speleothems, or mineral cave deposits. This study presents data from a multi-year monitoring effort in Titan Cave, Wyoming, a site of interest due to the abundance of speleothems suitable for paleoclimate reconstruction. Titan Cave exhibits annual cave [...]
Flood type drives river-scale plastic deposition
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science, Water Resource Management
Plastic pollution is considered a global environmental challenge, prompting international regulation efforts such as the UN plastic treaty to end plastic pollution. River basins, with high population densities and poor waste management, are particularly exposed to plastic pollution. Floods amplify plastic presence in rivers by mobilizing previously deposited and introduce new plastics. Yet, the [...]
Fresh ideas on modeling water demand and allocation in Global Hydrological Models
Published: 2025-02-28
Subjects: Hydrology
Global hydrological models are essential tools to address the increasing challenge of global water scarcity. However, current models often rely on simplistic assumptions for sectoral water allocation, limiting their ability to capture real-world complexities such as prioritization and competition among water uses. This paper introduces a theoretical two-layer framework that distinguishes between [...]
Beyond Single Hazard Framework: Multi-Hazard Worst Case Scenarios from Ensemble Tropical Cyclone Forecasts
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Meteorology, Oceanography, Risk Analysis
Ensemble forecasting is a powerful tool for supporting informed decision-making in managing multi-hazard risks associated with tropical cyclones (TCs). Although TC ensemble forecasts are widely used in operational numerical weather prediction systems, their potential for disaster prediction and management has not been fully exploited. Here we propose a novel, efficient, and practical method to [...]
Thermal channelization of suprapermafrost flows
Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Geomorphology, Hydrology
On many frozen hillslopes, subsurface water above permafrost is routed through regularly spaced, linear features known as water tracks. We test whether water tracks form through thermal channelization, where heat from viscous dissipation in flowpaths deepens the active layer, creating a preferred flow path that attracts more water. We derive equations for suprapermafrost Darcy flow and, using [...]
Harmonizing past and future global sectoral water use data
Published: 2025-02-13
Subjects: Hydrology
The use of water in the domestic, agricultural, and industrial sectors is necessary for human prosperity and survival. Recognizing the need to understand water scarcity and human contributions to it, various studies have been done over the years, necessitating access to reliable, comprehensive data on historical and projected water use across all sectors. Despite progress in this direction, a [...]
Philadelphia and the Schuylkill under extreme hydrometeorological events
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology
The Schuylkill River, a lifeline for Philadelphia, faces intensifying stress from urbanization and increasingly severe extreme hydrometeorological events (EHMEs) driven by climate change. Understanding how urban estuarine rivers respond to EHMEs remains challenging due to limited high-resolution data and the complexness of human-modified landscapes. Here, we combine long-term hydrological [...]
A review of open data for studying global groundwater in social-ecological systems
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Water Resource Management
Global data have served an integral role in characterizing large-scale groundwater systems, identifying their sustainability challenges, and informing on socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of groundwater. These insights have revealed groundwater as a dynamic component of both the water cycle and social-ecological systems, leading to an expansion in groundwater science that increasingly [...]
Quantifying Changes in Water Loading in the U.S. Southwest via Comparison of GNSS, GRACE, and SWE Datasets
Published: 2025-01-31
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Hydrology
The synthesis of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) gravimetry data and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) displacement data provides improved models of surface water hydrology. Much work remains to be done to understand the hydrological signal present in complementary geodetic data in much of the Western U.S., especially the Colorado River basin which comprises a diversity of [...]
GODEEEP-hydro: Historical and projected power system ready hydropower data for the United States
Published: 2025-01-08
Subjects: Hydrology, Power and Energy
Hydropower is a critical electricity resource in the United States which, in addition to renewable and carbon-free electricity generation, provides valuable ancillary grid services, and supports the integration of wind and solar resources. Despite its value to an increasingly decarbonized grid, there are very few comprehensive datasets available from which to study both historical and future [...]
Seasonal compound renewable energy droughts in the Unites States
Published: 2025-01-07
Subjects: Hydrology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Power and Energy
Variable renewable energy (VRE) droughts are periods of low renewable electricity production due to natural variability in the weather and climate. These compound renewable energy droughts occur when two or more (typically wind and solar) generation sources are in low availability conditions at the same time. Compound wind and solar droughts are most commonly studied at the hourly and daily [...]
Interpretability on agile machine learning models for hydrological predictions: A case study in the mega-disaster in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in May 4 2024
Published: 2024-12-30
Subjects: Hydrology
In May 2024, the region of the Rio Grande do Sul state experienced one of the worst floods in Brazilian history, affecting millions and causing severe damage to infrastructure. This study applies an agile hydrological forecasting approach using methods from traditional time-series models, such as ARIMA and SARIMA, and machine learning (ML) models, such as ElasticNet and LASSO. Data from [...]