Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Hydrology
Pleistocene shifts in Great Basin hydroclimate seasonality govern the formation of lithium-rich paleolake deposits
Published: 2024-04-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Paleobiology, Sedimentology
Southwestern North America is currently experiencing a multidecadal megadrought, with severe consequences for water resources. However, significant uncertainty remains about how precipitation will change in the 21st century in this semi-arid region. Paleoclimatic records are essential for both contextualizing current change, and for helping constrain the sensitivity of regional hydroclimate to [...]
EStreams: An Integrated Dataset and Catalogue of Streamflow, Hydro-Climatic Variables and Landscape Descriptors for Europe
Published: 2024-03-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology
Large-sample hydrology datasets have become increasingly available, contributing to significant scientific advances. However, in Europe, only a few such datasets have been published, capturing only a fraction of the wealth of information from national data providers in terms of available spatial density and temporal extent. We present “EStreams”, an extensive dataset of hydro-climatic [...]
Estimating irrigation water use from remotely sensed evapotranspiration data: Accuracy and uncertainties at field, water right, and regional scales
Published: 2024-02-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Irrigated agriculture is the dominant user of water globally, but most water withdrawals are not monitored or reported. As a result, it is largely unknown when, where, and how much water is used for irrigation. Here, we evaluated the ability of remotely sensed evapotranspiration (ET) data, integrated with other datasets, to calculate irrigation water withdrawals and applications in an intensively [...]
Towards an Open and Integrated Cyberinfrastructure for River Morphology Research in the Big Data Era
Published: 2024-02-16
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Computer Engineering, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Environmental Education, Environmental Engineering, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Systems and Communications, Water Resource Management
The objective of this paper is to present the initial illustration of a cyberinfrastructure named the River MORPhology Information System (RIMORPHIS) that addresses the current limitations related to river morphology data and tools. A new specification for data and semantics on river morphology datasets has been developed to support the web-based platform for discovering and visualization of [...]
River Floodplains, Organic Carbon, and Paleoclimate: How River Dynamics Impart Biases in the Biogeochemical Climate Record of Terrestrial Landscapes
Published: 2024-01-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
River floodplains can be both sources and sinks for organic carbon. In the sedimentary record, geochemical signatures of terrestrial water availability record climate and ecology along river corridors in deep time. However, paleoenvironmental reconstructions are often confounded by the complex dynamics of organic carbon residence, entrainment, and deposition in a fluvial system. As alluvial [...]
Wealth over Woe: global biases in hydro-hazard research
Published: 2024-01-12
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Hydrology, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
Floods, droughts, and rainfall-induced landslides are hydro-hazards that affect millions of people every year. Anticipation, mitigation, and adaptation to these hazards is increasingly outpaced by their changing magnitude and frequency due to climate change. A key question for society is whether the research we pursue has the potential to address knowledge gaps and to reduce potential future [...]
Open-source approach for reproducible substrate mapping using semantic segmentation on recreation-grade side scan sonar datasets
Published: 2023-12-21
Subjects: Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Programming Languages and Compilers, Software Engineering, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Knowledge of the variation and distribution of substrates at large spatial extents in aquatic systems, particularly rivers, is severely lacking, impeding species conservation and ecosystem restoration efforts. Air and space-borne remote sensing important for terrestrial and atmospheric measurements are limited in benthic environments due to river stage, turbidity, and canopy cover, requiring [...]
PHOTOMOB: AUTOMATED GIS METHOD FOR ESTIMATION OF FRACTIONAL GRAIN DYNAMICS IN GRAVEL BED RIVERS. PART 1: GRAIN SIZE
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Particle entrainment intensity is spatially and temporally variable, making it a complex phenomenon to measure. This paper is the first of a pair, in which we present an automated image processing procedure (PhotoMOB) for monitoring the mobility/stability of gravel river beds. The method is based on local comparison of the shape of the grains identified at the same coordinates between successive [...]
PhotoMOB: Automated GIS method for estimation of fractional grain dynamics in gravel bed rivers. Part 2: Bed stability and fractional mobility
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Bed mobility and stability are spatially and temporally variable, making it a complex phenomenon to study. This paper is the second of a pair, in which we present an automated image processing procedure for monitoring the mobility/stability of gravel river beds. The method is based on local comparison of the shape of the grains identified at the same coordinates between successive photos to [...]
Never train an LSTM on a single basin
Published: 2023-12-05
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Machine learning (ML) has an increasing role in the hydrological sciences, and in particular, certain types of time series modeling strategies are popular for rainfall-runoff modeling. A large majority of studies that use this type of model do not follow best practices, and there is one mistake in particular that is very common: training deep learning models on small, homogeneous data sets (i.e., [...]
UMIS: An Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System for Water Quality Resources in the Upper Mississippi River Basin
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Systems and Communications, Water Resource Management
The Upper Mississippi Information System (UMIS) is a cyberinfrastructure framework designed to support large-scale real-time water quality data integration, analysis, and visualization for the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB). UMIS is intended to directly address three of the Grand Challenges for Engineering including: 1) understanding access to clean drinking water, 2) management of the [...]
Looking upstream: analyzing the protection of the drainage area of Amazon rivers
Published: 2023-11-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
In the Amazon, aquatic ecosystems provide essential ecosystem services, including transportation, food, and livelihoods for millions of species. Land use changes and management impact these ecosystem services, and these impacts are not limited to the specific areas where they occur but propagate downstream along the drainage network. However, assessment of the accumulated human footprint upstream [...]
Defining Plastic Pollution Hotspots
Published: 2023-11-10
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology
Plastic pollution in the natural environment poses a growing threat to ecosystems and human health, prompting urgent needs for monitoring, prevention and clean-up measures, and new policies. To effectively prioritize resource allocation and mitigation strategies, it is key to identify and define plastic hotspots. UNEP’s draft global agreement on plastic pollution mandates prioritizing hotspots, [...]
Advancing Regional Flood Mapping in a Changing Climate: A HAND-Based Approach for New Jersey with Innovations in Catchment Analysis
Published: 2023-11-03
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology
Regional flood mapping poses computational and spatial heterogeneity challenges, exacerbated by climate change-induced uncertainties. This study focuses on creating a state-wide flood mapping solution with enhanced accuracy and computational speed to support regional flooding hazard analysis and the assessment of climate change, using New Jersey as a case study. The Height Above Nearest Drainage [...]
Pygoda: a graphical interface to efficiently visualise and explore large sets of geolocated time series
Published: 2023-10-24
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Climate, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Fresh Water Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces, Hydrology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Statistics and Probability, Spatial Science
Modern-day data sets in geosciences may comprise hundreds or thousands of geolocated time series. Despite all the automated tools and new algorithms now available to process and prepare those data before using them in research projects, it can be useful or even necessary to visualise and investigate them manually. Whether it be for data quality assessment, for the preparation of a training data [...]