Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Hydrology
Why do we have so many different hydrological models? A review based on the case of Switzerland
Published: 2021-02-02
Subjects: Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Hydrology plays a central role in applied and fundamental environmental sciences, but it is well known to suffer from an overwhelming diversity of models, particularly to simulate streamflow. We discuss here in detail how such diversity did arise based on the example of Switzerland. The case study's relevance stems from the fact that Switzerland, despite of being a small country, shows a variety [...]
Towards underwater plastic monitoring using echo sounding
Published: 2021-01-25
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology
Plastics originating from land are mainly transported to the oceans by rivers. The total plastic transport from land to seas remains uncertain because of difficulties in measuring and the lack of standard observation techniques. A large focus in observations is on plastics floating on the water surface. However, an increasing number of observations suggest that large quantities of plastics are [...]
Plastic plants: Water hyacinths as driver of plastic transport in tropical rivers
Published: 2021-01-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Recent studies suggest that water hyacinths play an important role in the transport of macroplastics in freshwater ecosystems. Forming large patches of several meters at the water surface, water hyacinths tend to entrain and aggregate large amounts of floating debris, including plastic items. Research on this topic is still novel and few studies have quantified the role of the water hyacinths in [...]
Assessing erosion and flood risk in the coastal zone through the application of the multilevel Monte Carlo method
Published: 2021-01-07
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability
The risk from erosion and flooding in the coastal zone has the potential to increase in a changing climate. The development and use of coupled hydro-morphodynamic models is therefore becoming an ever higher priority. However, their use as decision support tools suffers from the high degree of uncertainty associated with them, due to incomplete knowledge as well as natural variability in the [...]
LakeEnsemblR: An R package that facilitates ensemble modelling of lakes
Published: 2021-01-06
Subjects: Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Water Resource Management
Model ensembles have several benefits compared to single-model applications but are not frequently used within the lake modelling community. Setting up and running multiple lake models can be challenging and time consuming, despite the many similarities between the existing models (forcing data, hypsograph, etc.). Here we present an R package, LakeEnsemblR, that facilitates running ensembles of [...]
Multi-decadal improvement in U.S. lake water clarity
Published: 2020-12-17
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Across the globe, recent work examining the state of freshwater resources paints an increasingly dire picture of degraded water quality. However, much of this work either focuses on a small subset of large waterbodies or uses in situ water quality datasets that contain biases in when and where sampling occurred. Using these unrepresentative samples limits our understanding of landscape level [...]
Uncertainty Estimation with Deep Learning for Rainfall-Runoff Modelling
Published: 2020-12-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology
Deep Learning is becoming an increasingly important way to produce accurate hydrological predictions across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Uncertainty estimations are critical for actionable hydrological forecasting, and while standardized community benchmarks are becoming an increasingly important part of hydrological model development and research, similar tools for benchmarking [...]
The influence of orbital parameters on the North American Monsoon system during the Last Interglacial Period
Published: 2020-12-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The response of summer precipitation in the western U.S. to climate variability remains a subject of uncertainty. For example, paleoclimate records indicate the North American monsoon (NAM) was stronger and spatially more extensive during the Holocene, whereas recent modeling suggests a weakened NAM response to increasing temperatures. These illustrate diverging pictures of the NAM response to [...]
Reconstructing the morphologies and hydrodynamics of ancient rivers from source to sink: Cretaceous Western Interior Basin, Utah, USA
Published: 2020-11-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Quantitative reconstruction of palaeohydrology from fluvial stratigraphy provides sophisticated insights into the response, and relative impact, of tectonic and climatic drivers on ancient fluvial landscapes. Here, field measurements and a suite of quantitative approaches are used to develop a four-dimensional (space and time) reconstruction of palaeohydrology in Late Cretaceous palaeorivers of [...]
A Vision for the Future Low-Temperature Geochemical Data-scape
Published: 2020-11-21
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Other Computer Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Soil Science
Data sharing benefits the researcher, the scientific community, and most importantly, the public by enabling more impactful analysis of data and greater transparency in scientific research. However, like many other scientists, the low-temperature geochemistry (LTG) community has generally not developed protocols and standards for publishing, citing, and versioning datasets. This paper is the [...]
Impacts of a regional multi-year insect defoliation event on seasonal runoff ratios and instantaneous streamflow characteristics
Published: 2020-10-26
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Hydrology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Repeated moderate severity forest disturbances can cause short- and long-term shifts in ecosystem processes. Prior work has found that stand-replacing disturbances (e.g., clear-cutting) increases streamflow in temperate forests, but streamflow responses to repeated moderate severity disturbances are more equivocal. This study examined a moderate disturbance caused by an unexpected population [...]
Modeling transpiration with sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence via water use efficiency and stomatal conductance
Published: 2020-10-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology
Successfully applied in the carbon research area, sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) has raised the interest of researchers from the water research domain. However, the mechanism between SIF emitted by plants and transpiration (T) has not been fully explored. To improve the understanding of the relationship between SIF and T, we developed two SIF-T models, the WUE model and the [...]
A comprehensive study to understand the relationship of urbanization and population density with GRACE ΔTWS for selected study regions in India during 2003-2017
Published: 2020-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Planetary Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
This work investigates the relationship between urbanization, population density and meteorological variables (temperature & precipitation) on groundwater storage in India during the period January'2003 to January'2017. Variations in groundwater storage have been analysed using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) derived variations of Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS). In the first part [...]
Modulation of riverine concentration-discharge relationships by changes in the shape of the water transit time distribution
Published: 2020-10-21
Subjects: Geochemistry, Hydrology
The concentrations of weathering-derived solutes in rivers and their co-variance with discharge are thought to reflect reactive-transport processes in hillslopes and to reveal the sensitivity of solute fluxes to climatic change. It is expected that discharge-driven changes in water transit times play some role in setting concentration-discharge (C-Q) relationships, but knowledge gaps remain. To [...]
River Planform Extraction From High-Resolution SAR Images Via Generalised Gamma Distribution Superpixel Classification
Published: 2020-10-21
Subjects: Computer Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology
The extraction of river planforms from remotely sensed satellite images is a task of crucial importance to many applications such as land planning, water resource monitoring or flood prediction. In this paper we present a novel framework for the extraction of rivers from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, based on superpixel segmentation and subsequent classification. Superpixel segmentation [...]