Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Hydrology
Applying a science-forward approach to groundwater regulatory design
Published: 2022-07-14
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Hydrology, Nature and Society Relations
Groundwater sustainability is challenged by the difference between legal and scientific understanding of groundwater as well as the lack of focused attention to regulatory design in the literature on groundwater institutions, governance and management. The purpose of this paper is to use groundwater science to direct the necessary elements of regulatory design for the unique characteristics of [...]
Geochemical evidence for the nonexistence of supercritical geothermal fluids at the Yangbajing geothermal field, southern Tibet
Published: 2022-07-07
Subjects: Hydrology, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Exploring and exploiting high-temperature (even supercritical) geothermal resources are significant to meet energy demands and reduce carbon emissions. The Yangbajing geothermal field is the most exploited in China, with the currently highest temperature (329.8 °C) measured in a geothermal well. However, whether there are supercritical geothermal fluids beneath the deep parts of this geothermal [...]
Global water cycle shifts far beyond pre-industrial conditions – planetary boundary for freshwater change transgressed
Published: 2022-07-06
Subjects: Hydrology
Human actions compromise the many life-supporting functions provided by the freshwater cycle. Yet, scientific understanding of anthropogenic freshwater change and its long-term evolution is limited. Using a multi-model ensemble of global hydrological models, we estimate how, over a 145-year industrial period, streamflow and soil moisture have deviated from pre-industrial baseline conditions [...]
Towards Robust River Plastic Detection: Combining Lab and Field-based Hyperspectral Imagery
Published: 2022-06-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Statistical Models
Plastic pollution in aquatic ecosystems has increased dramatically in the last five decades, with strong impacts on human and aquatic life. Recent studies endorse the need for innovative approaches to monitor the presence, abundance, and types of plastic in these ecosystems. One approach gaining rapid traction is the use of multi- and hyperspectral cameras. However, most experiments using this [...]
Groundwater resource allocation in British Columbia: challenges and ways forward
Published: 2022-06-24
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Groundwater allocation in British Columbia is facing a number of important challenges as groundwater is licensed under the Water Sustainability Act and potentially included in modern treaties. These challenges include acknowledging the importance of groundwater in supporting environmental flow needs and human water use, the uncertainty and irrelevance of annual recharge estimates, and the [...]
SAR and InSAR data linked to soil moisture changes on a temperate raised peatland subjected to a wildfire
Published: 2022-06-17
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Hydrology, Soil Science
Interferometry of Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) can potentially contribute to the cost-effective regional or global monitoring of the degradation and restoration of peatlands. However, there are uncertainties about the links between InSAR results and peatland ecohydrological parameters, especially soil moisture. Here, we analyse the relationships between the temporal evolutions of InSAR [...]
Validation of glacial-interglacial rainfall variations in southwest Sulawesi using Mg/Ca and δ18O in speleothems
Published: 2022-06-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Hydrology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Speleology
The final version of this article is now published with Communications. Earth and Environment. To view this open access article, please use the Published Article DOI. Speleothem δ18O is widely used as a proxy for rainfall amount in the tropics on glacial-interglacial to interannual scales. However, uncertainties in the interpretation of this renowned proxy pose a vexing problem in tropical [...]
An Artificial Neural Network Emulator of the Rangeland Hydrology and Erosion Model
Published: 2022-06-17
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Dynamic Systems, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation
Machine learning (ML) is becoming an ever more important tool in hydrologic modeling. Many studies have shown the higher prediction accuracy of the ML models over traditional process-based ones. However, there is another advantage of ML which is its lower computer time of execution. This is important for the applications such as hydraulic soil erosion estimation over a large area and at a finer [...]
PING-Mapper: open-source software for automated benthic imaging and mapping using recreation-grade sonar
Published: 2022-06-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation
The characterization of benthic habitats is essential for aquatic ecosystem science and management, but is frequently limited by waterbody visibility and depth. Recreation-grade side scan sonar systems are increasingly used to aid scientific inquiries in shallow water due to their relative low-cost, ease of operation, low-weight, and ease of mounting on a variety of vessels. However, existing [...]
Mechanisms underlying the vulnerability of seasonally dry ecosystems to drought
Published: 2022-05-20
Subjects: Hydrology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Root-zone water storage (RWS) dynamics regulate when plants experience drought-related water stress and mortality. However, because RWS capacity (Smax) is poorly known, it remains challenging to translate variability in precipitation to water stress. Here, we investigate the relationship between precipitation variability and Smax and implement a framework for identifying the vulnerability of [...]
A univariate extreme value analysis and change point detection of monthly discharge in Kali Kupang, Central Java, Indonesia
Published: 2022-05-19
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Hydrology, Probability, Water Resource Management
This study presents how Extreme Value Analysis (EVA) can be used to predict future extreme hydrological events and how dynamic-programming based change point detection algorithm can be used to detect the abrupt transition in discharge events variability in Kali Kupang, Central Java, Indonesia. By using the annual block maxima, we can predict the upper extreme discharge probability from the Gumbel [...]
Caravan - A global community dataset for large-sample hydrology
Published: 2022-05-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
High-quality datasets are essential to support hydrological science and modeling. Several CAMELS (Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-sample Studies) datasets exist for specific countries or regions, however these datasets lack standardization, which makes global studies difficult. This paper introduces a dataset called Caravan (a series of CAMELS) that standardizes and aggregates [...]
The quest for the missing plastics: Large uncertainties in river plastic export into the sea
Published: 2022-05-16
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Studies, Hydrology
Plastic pollution in the natural environment is causing increasing concern at both the local and global scale. Understanding the dispersion of plastic through the environment is of key importance for the effective implementation of preventive measures and cleanup strategies. Over the past few years, various models have been developed to estimate the transport of plastics in rivers, using limited [...]
Breaking the window of detection: Using multi-scale solute tracer studies to assess mass recovery at the detection limit
Published: 2022-05-05
Subjects: Hydrology
Stream solute tracers are commonly injected to assess transport and transformation in study reaches, but results are biased toward the shortest and fastest storage locations. While this bias has been understood for decades, the impact of an experimental constraint on our understanding has yet to be considered. Here, we ask how different our understanding of reach- and segment-scale transport [...]
Fluid-driven transport of round sediment particles: from discrete simulations to continuum modeling
Published: 2022-04-16
Subjects: Applied Mechanics, Geomorphology, Hydrology
Bedload sediment transport is ubiquitous in shaping natural and engineered landscapes, but the variability in the relation between sediment flux and driving factors is not well understood. At a given Shields number, the observed dimensionless transport rate can vary over a range in controlled systems and up to several orders of magnitude in natural streams. Here we (1) experimentally validate a [...]