Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Water Resource Management
Does electricity scaling improve annual water-withdrawal estimates? Evidence from US Meta data centers
Published: 2026-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Studies, Water Resource Management
Planners often need to estimate data-center water use before detailed operating data exist, and a common shortcut multiplies electricity use by a historical water intensity. The logic is appealing: computing produces heat, and removing heat often takes water. Yet whether this shortcut beats the simplest alternative, persistence (assuming that each facility withdraws what it withdrew the year [...]
A Spatiotemporal Dataset of Urban Water Distribution Schedules
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Urban water supply in several rapidly growing cities in Latin America is managed through intermittent distribution schedules rather than continuous service, often in response to drought or water scarcity conditions. However, these practices are unevenly documented, and publicly available information is largely limited to cities where water authorities disclose distribution schedules. As a result, [...]
GROW-Qual: A global observational groundwater quality dataset linked to water table dynamics and Earth system variables
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Groundwater underpins freshwater supply, food production and ecosystem health across the globe. Yet, groundwater levels and quality are increasingly threatened by overextraction, contamination, and climate change. Understanding how water table dynamics and quality are interlinked and affected by these pressures requires integrated observational groundwater datasets combined with Earth system [...]
Leveraging satellite data and machine learning to quantify rooftop rainwater harvesting reliability and tank requirements for schools and health care facilities in Uganda
Published: 2026-10-18
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Water Resource Management
Many schools and health facilities in Uganda lack a reliable water supply, yet most have roofs that could collect rain. For 41,592 facilities (32,881 schools and 8,711 health facilities), we estimated how much water their roofs can supply, how large a tank each one needs, and how often that supply fails. Roof areas came from AI-derived building footprints (Google Open Buildings v3) and daily [...]
Fingerprinting PFAS pollution in European surface waters
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) comprise a large group of synthetic chemical substances used across industries and find application in a diverse range of consumer products. Owing to their ubiquitous use and ongoing emissions, such substances are distributed throughout the environment. PFAS and their metabolites pose considerable risk to environmental and human health due to their high [...]
Probabilistic Streamflow Forecasts for Mississippi River Navigation Risk and Parametric Insurance
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Mississippi River navigation is disrupted by both low and high water extremes, yet shippers, ports, and terminals lack a simple instrument to transfer that risk. We test whether probabilistic forecasts of monthly streamflow can provide useful navigation-risk information. Using pretrained Chronos-2 at three major Mississippi River subbasin outlets, we compute navigation risk probabilities, [...]
Groundwater Potential Mapping in Northwestern Nigeria: A Comparison of the Analytic Hierarchy Process and Galileo-Enhanced CAT-XGB
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Global water scarcity intensifies the need for high-resolution groundwater assessment tools, yet traditional approaches struggle to reconcile qualitative expert weights with the extensive spatial coverage offered by remote sensing data. This study presents a comparative framework evaluating expert-driven Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (a ten-layer Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)) against [...]
Understanding Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Urban Water Bodies via Multi-Classifier Machine Learning Approaches in Semi-Arid Ahmedabad City
Published: 2026-10-08
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Water Resource Management
The research examines the spatiotemporal change of water bodies in Ahmedabad city in western part of India which is a rapidly urbanizing area. It integrates high-resolution remote sensing data with modern machine learning approaches. Understanding the long-term pattern is crucial to understanding and managing the water resources in the changing climate, also city experiences the low precipitation [...]
Impact of Soil Data Representation on Streamflow Modelling: A Contiguous-Object Connectivity Approach Case Study in Switzerland
Published: 2026-10-05
Subjects: Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Hydrological models often rely on soil data to represent water partitioning, storage and release within a catchment. However, differences in soil data representation may be obscured by calibration when performance is evaluated primarily against streamflow. This study investigates how alternative soil datasets influence streamflow performance, internal hydrological processes, and parameter [...]
Orientations to navigate the complexity of freshwater resilience in social-ecological systems
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Hydrology, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Resilience is a widely applied and diversely interpreted concept in freshwater science with applications that span disciplines, analytical frameworks, scales of analysis, and system delineations. This diversity leads to an equally rich variety of resilience insights which are difficult to compare, aggregate, synthesize, and apply in decision-relevant contexts. Here, we seek to support greater [...]
Groundwater-dependent ecosystems are missing from global research and policy agendas
Published: 2026-09-23
Subjects: Hydrology, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
A groundwater-dependent ecosystem (GDE) can be a stream or wetland sustained by groundwater, a terrestrial ecosystem that relies on groundwater for root water uptake, or the biodiversity that lives within aquifers. These ecosystems perform hydrological, ecological, and climate functions, and are meaningful to people through recreational, spiritual, and cultural practices. Traditionally studied at [...]
National-scale mapping locates the mismatch between perceived and assessed flood risk in India
Published: 2026-09-22
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Flood risk management assumes that people in hazardous places recognize the danger they face, but evidence on flood risk perception remains sparse in South Asia, home to much of the world's flood-exposed population. India has more than 600 million people exposed to inland flood hazards and the highest flood-related mortality in Asia, yet no national evidence base on flood risk perception. Here we [...]
A safe and just operating space for water at municipal scale: population, agriculture and mining in Chihuahua, Mexico, to 2050
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water allocation decisions in Mexico are taken municipality by municipality, yet water scarcity is assessed at national or basin scale. We operationalize a safe and just operating space for water for each of the 67 municipalities of Chihuahua, Mexico's largest and driest mining state, with both bounds drawn from national law rather than imposed by the analyst: an ecological ceiling equal to the [...]
Investigation of Drivers and Sources of Potential Harmful Algal Blooms in Lake Anna, Virginia, 2023–24
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Algal blooms in freshwater reservoirs are an increasing concern because of the risk to aquatic ecosystem health, recreational use, and water quality. Among the taxa that comprise an algal bloom, cyanobacteria are of particular concern due to the potential to produce toxic compounds which can cause acute and chronic illness in humans if ingested through contaminated water or shellfish. When toxins [...]
Mapping one million small reservoirs in Brazil highlights widespread environmental and policy implications
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Water Resource Management
Small dams and reservoirs disrupt hydrological connectivity and increase evaporative water loss across Brazil, yet most remain unmapped. Applying deep learning to Sentinel satellite data from 2021, we created a comprehensive map of 1.1 million small on-stream reservoirs (smaller than 50 ha). Their 7,597 km^2 cumulative surface area surpasses the combined area of Brazil’s three largest mega-dam [...]