Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Hydrology
Heavy rainfall in Paraguay during the 2015-2016 austral summer: causes and sub-seasonal-to-seasonal predictive skill
Published: 2019-02-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
During the austral summer 2015/16, severe flooding displaced over 170 000 people on the Paraguay River system in Paraguay, Argentina, and southern Brazil. These floods were driven by repeated heavy rainfall events in the lower Paraguay River basin. Alternating sequences of enhanced moisture inflow from the South American low-level jet and local convergence associated with baroclinic systems were [...]
Beo v1.0: Numerical model of heat flow and low-temperature thermochronology in hydrothermal systems
Published: 2019-01-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Low-temperature thermochronology can provide records of the thermal history of the upper crust and can be a valuable tool to quantify the history of hydrothermal systems. However, existing model codes of heat flow around hydrothermal systems do not include low-temperature thermochronology. Here I present a new model code that simulates thermal history around hydrothermal systems on geological [...]
Intensity-Duration-Frequency curves at the global scale
Published: 2018-12-18
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves usefully quantify extreme precipitation over various durations and return periods for engineering design. Unfortunately, sparse, infrequent or short observations hinder the creation of robust IDF curves in many locations. This paper presents the first global, multi-temporal (1 to 360 hours) dataset of Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) parameters at 31 km [...]
Episodic fluid flow in an active fault
Published: 2018-11-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
We present a 250 ka record of episodic fluid flow along the Malpais fault which hosts the Beowawe hydrothermal system, Nevada, USA. The history of fluid flow was quantified using a novel combination of the apatite (U-Th)/He (AHe) thermochronometer and a model of the thermal effects of fluid flow. Samples show partial resetting of the AHe thermochronometer in a 40 m wide zone around the normal [...]
Calibration of astigmatic particle tracking velocimetry based on generalized Gaussian feature extraction
Published: 2018-11-20
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Fluid Dynamics, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Flow and transport in porous media are driven by pore scale processes. Particle tracking in transparent porous media allows for the observation of these processes at the time scale of ms. We demonstrate an application of defocusing particle tracking using brightfield illumination and a CMOS camera sensor. The resulting images have relatively high noise levels. To address this challenge, we [...]
Imbalance in the modern hydrologic budget of topographic catchments along the western slope of the Andes (21–25 S)
Published: 2018-11-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rates of water discharge often exceed groundwater recharge in arid catchments. This apparent mass imbalance within a catchment may be reconciled through either regional-scale groundwater flow between topographic drainages and/or the draining of stored groundwater recharged during pluvial periods. We investigate discrepancies in the modern hydrologic budget of catchments along the west flank of [...]
Rapid and accurate estimates of streamflow depletion caused by groundwater pumping using analytical depletion functions
Published: 2018-11-12
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Reductions in streamflow due to groundwater pumping (‘streamflow depletion’) can negatively impact water users and aquatic ecosystems but are challenging to estimate due to the time and expertise required to develop numerical models often used for water management. Here, we develop analytical depletion functions, which are simpler approaches consisting of (i) stream proximity criteria which [...]
Advancing global flood hazard simulations by improving comparability, benchmarking, and integration of global flood models
Published: 2018-10-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In recent years, a range of global flood models (GFMs) were developed, each utilizing different process descriptions as well as validation data sets and methods. To quantify the magnitude of these differences, studies assessed the performance of GFMs on the continental and catchment level. Since the default models set-ups resulted in locally marked [...]
Wavelet-based analysis of ground deformation coupling satellite acquisitions (Sentinel-1, SMOS) and data from shallow and deep wells in Southwestern France
Published: 2018-10-15
Subjects: Aerospace Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Acquisitions of the Sentinel-1 satellite are processed and comprehensively analyzed to investigate the ground displacement during a 3-year period above a gas storage site in Southwestern France. Despite quite low vertical displacements (between 4 and 8 mm) compared to the noise level, the local displacements reflects the variations due to charge and discharge during summer and winter periods, [...]
Lake area constraints on past hydroclimate in the western United States: Application to Pleistocene Lake Bonneville
Published: 2018-10-09
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Lake shoreline remnants found in basins of the western United States reflect wetter conditions during Pleistocene glacial periods. The size distribution of paleolakes, such as Lake Bonneville, provide a first-order constraint on the competition between regional precipitation delivery and evaporative demand. In this contribution we downscale previous work using lake mass balance equations and [...]
Do surface lateral flows matter for data assimilation of soil moisture observations into hyperresolution land models?
Published: 2018-10-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Hyperresolution land modeling is expected to innovate the simulation of terrestrial water, energy, and carbon cycles. One of the major advantages of existing hyperresolution land models against conventional 1-demensional land surface models is that surface and subsurface lateral water flows can be explicitly simulated. Despite a lot of efforts on assimilating hydrological observations into the [...]
Vulnerability of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands to present-day rates of relative sea-level rise
Published: 2018-09-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Sedimentology, Soil Science, Stratigraphy, Sustainability
Coastal Louisiana has lost about 5,000km2 of wetlands over the past century and concern exists whether remaining wetlands will persist while facing some of the world’s highest rates of relative sea-level rise (RSLR). Here we analyse an unprecedented data set derived from 274 rod surface-elevation table-marker horizon stations, to determine present-day surface-elevation change, vertical accretion [...]
Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning
Published: 2018-09-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Climate, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability, Water Resource Management
Water resources planning requires making decisions about infrastructure development under substantial uncertainty in future regional climate conditions. However, uncertainty in climate change projections will evolve over the 100-year lifetime of a dam as new climate observations become available. Flexible strategies in which infrastructure is proactively designed to be changed in the future have [...]
Backwater Controls on the Sedimentology, Kinematics and Geometry of Bar Deposits in Coastal Rivers
Published: 2018-09-23
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
The backwater reach of coastal rivers is associated with considerable spatial and temporal variability in water and sediment flux. Here we test the hypothesis that the spatial and temporal variability in water flux and particle sizes in transport result in systematic changes in the geometry of bank-attached bars across the backwater transition. Measured transverse slopes of bank-attached bars in [...]
Complex and cascading triggering of submarine landslides and turbidity currents at volcanic islands revealed from integration of high-resolution onshore and offshore surveys
Published: 2018-09-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, Volcanology
Submerged flanks of volcanic islands are prone to hazards including submarine landslides that may trigger damaging tsunamis and fast-moving sediment-laden seafloor flows (turbidity currents) that break critical seafloor infrastructure. Small Island Developing States are particularly vulnerable to these hazards due to their remote and isolated nature, small size, high population densities and weak [...]