Catchment characterization: Current descriptors, knowledge gaps and future opportunities

Tarasova, Larisa; Gnann, Sebastian; Yang, Soohyun; Hartmann, Andreas; Wagener, Thorsten

doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2024.104739

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 151 publications

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“…The establishment of a network of geographically distributed observatories would facilitate the achievement of a high level of representativeness regarding existing gradients of geology, climate, and land-use. This would assist in the identification of priority areas requiring further investigation, and alleviate some of the bias in current hydrological studies (Burt and McDonnell, 2015;Tarasova et al, 2024). Depending on the availability of resources, some of these observatories can be developed into hydrological super-sites that are particularly suitable for specific questions, such as karst hydrology, water scarcity, floodplains, forest hydrology, precision agriculture, or different runoff generation mechanisms.…”

Section: How To Manage a Network Of Hydrological Observatories?mentioning

confidence: 99%

HESS Opinions: Towards a common vision for the future of hydrological observatories

Nasta,

Blöschl,

Bogena

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Abstract. The Unsolved Problems in Hydrology (UPH) initiative has emphasized the need to establish networks of multi-decadal hydrological observatories to tackle catchment-scale challenges on a global scale. The already existing monitoring infrastructures have provided an enormous amount of hydrometeorological data, which has helped gain detailed insights into the causality of hydrological processes, test scientific theories and hypotheses, and reveal the physical laws governing catchment behavior. Nevertheless, we are still a long way from being able to fully unravel all the mysteries of hydrological processes to solve practical water-related problems. Hydrological monitoring programs have often produced limited outcomes because of the intermittent availability of financial resources and the substantial efforts required to operate observatories and conduct comparative studies to advance previous findings. Recently, some initiatives have emerged aiming at coordinating data acquisition and hypothesis testing to facilitate an efficient cross-site synthesis of findings. To this end, a common vision and practical data management solutions need to be developed. This opinion paper provocatively discusses two end members of possible future hydrological observatory (HO) networks for a given hypothesized community budget: a comprehensive set of moderately instrumented observatories or, alternatively, a small number of highly instrumented super-sites. A network of moderately instrumented, hydrological monitoring sites distributed across the globe would provide broad spatial coverage across the major pedoclimatic regions, help address UPH about the impact of climate and social systems (e.g., land use change and global warming) on water resources, and enhance the potential for knowledge transfer. However, the moderate instrumentation at each site may hamper an in-depth understanding of complex hydrological processes. In contrast, a few extensively instrumented research sites would allow for community-based experiments in an unprecedented manner, thereby providing more fundamental insights into complex, non-linear processes modulated by scale-dependent feedback and multiscale spatio-temporal heterogeneity. Lumping resources has proven to be an effective strategy in other geosciences, e.g. for research vessels in oceanography and drilling programs in geology. On the downside, a few catchments will not be representative of all pedoclimatic regions, necessitating the consideration of generalization issues. A discussion on the relative merits and limitations of these two visions on HOs is presented with the objective of building consensus on the optimal path for the hydrological community to address the UPH in the coming decades. A final synthesis proposes the potential for combining the two end members into a flexible management strategy.

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Section: How To Manage a Network Of Hydrological Observatories?mentioning

confidence: 99%

HESS Opinions: Towards a common vision for the future of hydrological observatories

Nasta,

Blöschl,

Bogena

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Catchment-specific descriptors are essential in considering the wide range of heterogeneity in climate, topography and runoff behaviour over peninsular India (Kurths et al, 2019;Vignesh et al, 2019), mainly because rainfall variability is large across arid regions (Tarasova et al, 2024) of peninsular river basins, where stream flows are nonperennial. Further, under increasingly dry conditions, as in peninsular India, the climate signal often tends to be less predictive for the propagation of meteorological to streamflow droughts.…”

Section: Identification Of Catchment Clusters For Regional Streamflow...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Streamflow drought onset and severity explained by non‐linear responses between climate‐catchment and land surface processes

Raut,

Ganguli,

Kumar

et al. 2024

Hydrological Processes

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Knowledge of drought onset and its relationship with drought severity (deficit volume) is crucial for providing timely information for reservoir operations, irrigation scheduling, devising cropping choices and patterns and managing surface and groundwater water resources. An analysis of the relationship between drought onset timing and deficit volume can help in drought hazard assessments and associated risks. Despite its importance, little attention has been paid to understand the drought onset timing and its potential linkage with deficit volume for effective drought monitoring and its impact assessment. Further, only a few studies have explored the role of environmental controls, encompassing the interaction between climate, catchment and land‐surface processes in influencing streamflow droughts and associated characteristics such as onset time and severity. This study leverages quality‐controlled streamflow observations from 1965 to 2018 to unveil regional patterns of streamflow drought onset, at‐site trends in deficit volume and detect non‐linear relationships between onset timing and deficit volume across 82 rain‐fed catchments in peninsular India (8°–24° N, 72°–87° E). We show that around 12% of catchments show an earlier onset of streamflow droughts in conjunction with a decreasing trend in deficit volume. Further, approximately one‐third of the catchments show a significant non‐linear dependency between drought deficit volume and onset time. Among catchment controls, such as soil and topographic properties, we found soil organic carbon stock and stock as dominant drivers controlling the streamflow drought onset time. Likewise, sand content and vertical distance to channel network control the streamflow deficit volume. Finally, the linkages between inferred dominant low‐flow generation mechanisms and the specific combinations of environmental controls are synthesized in a conceptual diagram that might assist in developing appropriate models for low‐flow simulations and predictions, especially across ungauged sites. The new insights add value to understanding the chain of physical processes linking climatic and physiographic controls on streamflow droughts, which can support drought forecasting and climate impact assessment efforts.

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A unified runoff generation scheme for applicability across different hydrometeorological zones

Zhang,

Chao

et al. 2024

Environmental Modelling & Software

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Catchment characterization: Current descriptors, knowledge gaps and future opportunities

Cited by 5 publications

References 151 publications

HESS Opinions: Towards a common vision for the future of hydrological observatories

HESS Opinions: Towards a common vision for the future of hydrological observatories

Streamflow drought onset and severity explained by non‐linear responses between climate‐catchment and land surface processes

A unified runoff generation scheme for applicability across different hydrometeorological zones

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