Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Water Resource Management
Lidar-based snow monitoring: cable car deployment in the Austrian Alps
Published: 2024-06-26
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Fresh Water Studies, Water Resource Management
Traditional methods for surveying the spatial and temporal distribution of snow are often time-consuming, costly, and potentially hazardous. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach utilizing a newly developed sensor system based on cost-effective industrial lidar sensors. This system is designed to be mounted on cable cars, enabling continuous envi- ronmental scanning during [...]
Detecting methane emissions from palm oil mills with airborne and spaceborne imaging spectrometers
Published: 2024-06-21
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Water Resource Management
Methane (CH4) emissions from human activities are a major cause of global warming, necessitating effective mitigation strategies. In particular, the palm oil industry generates palm oil mill effluent (POME), which continuously emits methane into the atmosphere. Satellites are becoming a powerful tool to detect and quantify methane emissions, but there is no evidence of their ability to monitor [...]
Shifts in water supply and demand drive land cover change across Chile
Published: 2024-06-19
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
Globally, droughts are becoming longer, more frequent and more severe, and their impacts are multidimensional. The impacts of droughts typically extend beyond the water balance as they accumulate over time, and can lead to regime shifts in land use. Here, we assess the effects of temporal changes in water supply and demand on vegetation productivity and land cover change over multiple time scales [...]
Exploring coastal climate adaptation through storylines: Insights from Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique
Published: 2024-06-11
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Meteorology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Water Resource Management
Coastal settlements, facing increasing flood risk from Tropical Cyclones (TCs) under climate change, need local and detailed climate information for effective adaptation. Analysis of historical events and their impacts provides such information. This study uses storylines to evaluate adaptation strategies, focusing on Cyclone Idai’s impact on Beira, Mozambique, under different climate [...]
HarvestGRID: High-resolution harvested crop areas of the United States from 1981 to 2019
Published: 2024-05-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Life Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The United States is a major producer and exporter of agricultural goods, fulfilling global demands for food, fiber, and fuel while generating substantial economic benefits. Agriculture in the U.S. not only dominates land use but also ranks as the largest water-consuming sector. High-resolution cropland mapping and insights into cultivation trends are essential to enhance sustainable management [...]
Local water year values for the conterminous United States
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Fresh Water Studies, Water Resource Management
Quantifying and predicting precipitation and its influence on ecosystems is challenged by the asynchrony between precipitation and water fluxes. To account for this asynchrony, scientists and managers use “water year” to estimate precipitation and its impacts on water flow and ecosystems. However, traditional water year definitions either do not consider areal variation in climate and hydrology [...]
Rising temperatures drive lower summer minimum flows across hydrologically diverse catchments
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Excessively low stream flows harm ecosystems and societies, so two key goals of low-flow hydrology are to understand their drivers and to predict their severity and frequency. We show that simple linear regressions can accomplish both goals across diverse catchments. We analyse 230 unregulated moderate to high relief catchments across rainfall-dominated, hybrid, snowmelt-dominated, and glacial [...]
Limited role of discharge in global river plastic transport
Published: 2024-04-23
Subjects: Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
River plastic transport has been assumed to be driven by river discharge, although observational data does often not support this. We propose a new perspective that describes plastic transport as function of plastic availability and transport capacity. Plastic transport is under most circumstances driven by plastic availability, which is largely disconnected from river discharge. However, when [...]
Wastewaters co-produced with shale gas drive slight regional salinization of groundwater
Published: 2024-04-04
Subjects: Geochemistry, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Water Resource Management
While unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) is changing the world economy, processes that are used during UOGD such as high-volume hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) have been linked with water contamination. Water quality risks include leaks of gas and salty fluids (brines) that are co-produced at wellpads. Identifying the cause of contamination is difficult, however, because UOG wells [...]
Estimating irrigation water use from remotely sensed evapotranspiration data: Accuracy and uncertainties across spatial scales
Published: 2024-02-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Irrigated agriculture is the dominant use 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]