Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Hydrology
Climate controls the length and shape of the world’s drainage basins
Published: 2020-04-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Submitted manuscript currently under review at Geophysical Research Letters (American Geophysical Union publication).
International disparities in open access practices of the Earth Sciences community
Published: 2020-03-31
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Cosmochemistry, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Hydrology, Library and Information Science, Mineral Physics, Other Earth Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Soil Science, Speleology, Stratigraphy, Tectonics and Structure, Volcanology
Short communication on international disparities in open access practices of the Earth Sciences community
RainDisaggGAN - Temporal Disaggregation of Spatial Rainfall Fields with Generative Adversarial Networks
Published: 2020-03-30
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Creating spatially coherent rainfall patterns with high temporal resolution from data with lower temporal resolution is an important topic in many geoscientific applications. From a statistical perspective, this presents a high-dimensional and highly under-determined problem. However, recent advances in unsupervised machine learning provide methods for learning such high-dimensional probability [...]
Saturation excess overland flow accelerates the spread of a generalist soil-borne pathogen
Published: 2020-03-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Plant pathogens are a major agent of disturbance in ecosystems worldwide. Disturbance by disease can alter the hydrological function of affected ecosystems. However, many plant pathogens are also sensitive to soil moisture and can be propagated by the transport of infectious tissue or reproductive structures in surface flow, so that hydrological processes can drive pathogen infection. These [...]
Streamflow depletion estimation for conjunctive water management in a heavily-stressed aquifer using analytical depletion functions
Published: 2020-03-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Groundwater pumping can lead to reductions in streamflow (‘streamflow depletion’) and estimating streamflow depletion is critical for conjunctive groundwater-surface water management. Streamflow depletion can be quantified using either analytical models, which have low data requirements but many simplifying assumptions, or numerical models, which represent physical processes more realistically [...]
Global dominance of tectonics over climate in shaping river longitudinal profiles
Published: 2020-03-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
River networks are striking features engraved into Earths surface, shaped by uplift and erosion under the joint influence of climate and tectonics. How a river descends along its course – its longitudinal profile – varies greatly from one basin to the next, reflecting the interplay between uplift and erosional processes. It has recently been argued that climatic aridity should be a first-order [...]
Global groundwater sustainability
Published: 2020-02-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
No abstract but introduction: Groundwater resources are the most reliable source of freshwater on the planet, so long as they are sustainably managed. While serious groundwater depletion and contamination are well documented in several regions around the world, other regions have the potential to leverage under-developed groundwater resources to fuel local human development. Here, I argue for the [...]
What Role Does Hydrological Science Play in the Age of Machine Learning?
Published: 2020-02-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We suggest that there is a potential danger to the hydrological sciences community in not recognizing how transformative machine learning will be for the future of hydrological modeling. Given the recent success of machine learning applied to modeling problems, it is unclear what the role of hydrological theory might be in the future. We suggest that a central challenge in hydrology right now [...]
Tracking Flooding Phase Transitions and Establishing a Passive Hotline with AI-Enabled Social Media Data
Published: 2020-02-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Flooding management requires collecting real-time onsite information widely and rapidly. As an emerging data source, social media demonstrates an advantage of providing in-time, rich data in the format of texts and photos and can be used to improve flooding situation awareness. The present study shows that social media data, with additional information processed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) [...]
The effect of surge on riverine flood hazard and impact in deltas globally
Published: 2020-02-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Current global riverine flood risk studies assume a constant mean sea level boundary. In reality high sea levels can propagate up a river, impede high river discharge, thus leading to elevated water levels. Riverine flood risk in deltas may therefore be underestimated. This paper presents the first global scale assessment of the joint influence of riverine and coastal drivers of flooding in [...]
Comparison of permeability predictions on cemented sandstones with physics-based and machine learning approaches
Published: 2020-02-06
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Hydrology, Multivariate Analysis, Petroleum Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
Permeability prediction has been an important problem since the time of Darcy. Most approaches to solve this problem have used either idealized physical models or empirical relations. In recent years, machine learning (ML) has led to more accurate and robust, but less interpretable empirical models. Using 211 core samples collected from 12 wells in the Garn Sandstone from the North Sea, this [...]
Integrating suspended sediment flux in large alluvial river channels: Application of a synoptic Rouse-based model to the Irrawaddy and Salween rivers
Published: 2020-02-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
A large portion of freshwater and sediment is exported to the ocean by a small number of major rivers. Many of these mega-rivers are subject to substantial anthropogenic pressures, which are having a major impact on water and sediment delivery to deltaic ecosystems. Due to hydrodynamic sorting, sediment grain size and composition varies strongly with depth and across the channel in large rivers, [...]
Sensitivity Analysis of a Conceptual, Lumped Model Using VARS-TOOL Applied to Western Ghats Catchments of India
Published: 2020-01-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
The present work considers the application of Variogram Analysis of Response Surfaces Toolbox (VARS-TOOL) to identify the sensitive parameters of a rainfall-runoff model in the Netravati river basin of Karnataka, India using the global sensitivity analysis method. The statistical bootstrapping method is used to obtain the confidence intervals around each of the sensitivity indices. The VARS-TOOL [...]
High Attenuation Recycled Materials as landfill liners (the HARM project) – A new concept for improved landfill liner design
Published: 2020-01-28
Subjects: Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Education, Engineering, Engineering Science and Materials, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydrology, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Public Health, Soil Science
A new approach in landfill liner design which combines hydraulic containment of leachate with contaminant attenuation to improve the performance of these environmental control systems at landfills is described. The idea is to re-use readily available industrial waste residues (construction and biomass waste) as additives for natural clay liners, wherein the additives have specific properties [...]
Event-based contact angle measurements inside porous media using time-resolved micro-computed tomography
Published: 2020-01-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Hypothesis Capillary-dominated multiphase flow in porous materials is strongly affected by the pore walls’ wettability. Recent micro-computed tomography (mCT) studies found unexpectedly wide contact angle distributions measured on static fluid distributions inside the pores. We hypothesize that analysis on time-resolved mCT data of fluid invasion events may be more directly relevant to the fluid [...]