Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Hydrology
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: 2024-09-26
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: 2024-09-25
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: 2024-08-27
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: 2024-08-23
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 [...]
How much is enough? Uncertainty aware sample mass determination of coarse-grained soils for particle size analyses
Published: 2024-08-23
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Earth Sciences, Probability, Sedimentology, Soil Science, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Stratigraphy
Determining particle size distributions (PSD) of soils is a basic first step in many geotechnical analyses and guidance is given in different national standards. For ambiguous reasons, the recommended required minimum sample mass (m_min) for the PSD-analyses of soils with a main component of gravel or greater is always based on equations including the soil's maximum grain diameter (D_max). We [...]
An Integrated Framework for Actionable Flood Warnings on Road Structures Using High Resolution Satellite Imagery
Published: 2024-08-17
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology
Floods rank among the most devastating natural hazards globally. Unlike many other natural calamities, floods typically occur in densely populated regions, resulting in immediate and long-term adverse impacts on communities, including fatalities, injuries, health risks, and significant economic and environmental losses annually. Traditional flood models, while useful, are constrained by [...]
Using Hydrogeomorphic Features to Quantify Structural and Functional Hydrologic Connectivity in a Coastal Plain Headwater Stream
Published: 2024-08-02
Subjects: Geomorphology, Hydrology
Headwater streams comprise most of the global river length, and hydrologic processes occurring in headwaters affect the chemical, physical, and biological functions of downstream aquatic ecosystems. However, we do not have a clear understanding of the spatial scales that drive hydrologic processes across headwater systems, particularly in Coastal Plain landscapes. We address this gap by [...]
Amplifying Exploration of Regional Climate Risks: Clustering Future Projections on Regionally Relevant Impact Drivers Not Emission Scenarios
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Hydrology, Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis
Climate impacts will continue to evolve over the coming decades, requiring regions worldwide to obtain actionable climate information. Global Climate Models (GCMs) are often used to explore future conditions, but the variability of projections among GCMs complicates regional climate risk assessments. This variability in future projections is only partly explained by the often-used emission [...]
Modeling sediment compaction beneath ice lenses during frost heave
Published: 2024-07-13
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Frost heave occurs when the ground swells during freezing conditions due to the growth of ice lenses in the subsurface. The mechanics of ice-infiltrated sediment, or frozen fringe, influences the formation and evolution of ice lenses. As the frozen fringe thickens during freezing, progressive unloading can result in dilation of the pore space and the formation of new ice lenses. Compaction can [...]
Skilful probabilistic predictions of UK floods months ahead using machine learning models trained on multimodel ensemble climate forecasts
Published: 2024-07-12
Subjects: Climate, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seasonal streamflow forecasts are an important component of flood risk management. Hybrid forecasting methods that predict seasonal streamflow using machine learning models driven by climate model outputs are currently underexplored, yet have some important advantages over traditional approaches using hydrological models. Here we develop a hybrid subseasonal to seasonal streamflow forecasting [...]
Increasingly seasonal jet stream drives stormy episodes with joint wind-flood risk in Great Britain
Published: 2024-07-03
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Hydrology, Multivariate Analysis
Ignoring a correlation between flooding and extreme winds underestimates risk to insurers or providers of critical infrastructure such as railways or electricity. We explore this potential underestimation for Northwest Europe, illustrated using Great Britain (GB), using an event-based analysis in regional 12 km UK Climate Projections (UKCP18, 1981-1999, 2061-2079 – RCP8.5). We derive a new [...]