Large‐scale river flow archives: importance, current status and future needs

Hannah, David M.; Demuth, S.; Lanen, H.A.J. van; Looser, Ulrich; Prudhomme, Christel; Rees, Gwyn; Stahl, Kerstin; Tallaksen, Lena M.

doi:10.1002/hyp.7794

Cited by 334 publications

(279 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…This directly mitigates a long-standing barrier of nonquantification of river flows for the vast majority of rivers on Earth, which impedes the efforts of scientists and policymakers to assess global vulnerabilities in human and ecosystem water security, compliance with transboundary river water-sharing agreements, water balance closure in climate models, flood probabilities, food chains, deforestation, and many other problems (1,2,(29)(30)(31)(32). Although the manually derived river width measurements described here are labor intensive, at least two methods exist for automated mapping of river widths from satellite imagery (33,34).…”

Section: Feasibility Demonstrations and Implications For Global Watermentioning

confidence: 99%

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Toward global mapping of river discharge using satellite images and at-many-stations hydraulic geometry

Gleason

Smith

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

285

288

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Rivers provide critical water supply for many human societies and ecosystems, yet global knowledge of their flow rates is poor. We show that useful estimates of absolute river discharge (in cubic meters per second) may be derived solely from satellite images, with no ground-based or a priori information whatsoever. The approach works owing to discovery of a characteristic scaling law uniquely fundamental to natural rivers, here termed a river's at-many-stations hydraulic geometry. A first demonstration using Landsat Thematic Mapper images over three rivers in the United States, Canada, and China yields absolute discharges agreeing to within 20-30% of traditional in situ gauging station measurements and good tracking of flow changes over time. Within such accuracies, the door appears open for quantifying river resources globally with repeat imaging, both retroactively and henceforth into the future, with strong implications for water resource management, food security, ecosystem studies, flood forecasting, and geopolitics. S ome 80% of the world's population and 65% of its river ecosystems are threatened by insecure water supply, yet global knowledge of the river discharges upon which these depend is surprisingly poor (1, 2). For much of the world, river gauge measurements are rare, nonexistent, or proprietary. Even wellmonitored countries have sparsely distributed networks, thus limiting current understanding of water losses along river courses, habitat changes, and flood risk (3, 4). Satellites, in contrast, provide spatially dense coverage globally, attracting calls for a global river discharge mapping capacity from space (5-10). However, previous efforts to estimate river discharge from remotely sensed observations have all required inclusion of some form of ancillary ground-based information, such as gauge measurements, bathymetric surveys, and/or calibrated hydrology models that are simply unavailable for most of the planet (11-18). To remove this dependence on ground-based information, we show that useful estimates of absolute river discharge (i.e., in units of cubic meters per second) may be derived solely from multiple satellite images of a river, with no ground-based or a priori information whatsoever, through use of a characteristic scaling law, here termed a river's atmany-stations hydraulic geometry (AMHG). As will be shown in this paper, AMHG effectively halves the number of parameters required by traditional hydraulic geometry, thus paving the way for remote estimation of a single remaining parameter-and thus river discharge-through repeated satellite image observations along a river course. The presence of AMHG is verified in 12 of 12 rivers examined, using 88 in situ gauging stations, three fieldcalibrated hydrodynamic models incorporating 772 field-surveyed bathymetric cross-sections, and 42 Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite images (SI Text, section S1, Materials and Methods and Tables S1 and S2). Following a description of width AMHG, an innovative satellite discharge estimation approach i...

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Section: Feasibility Demonstrations and Implications For Global Watermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…S ome 80% of the world's population and 65% of its river ecosystems are threatened by insecure water supply, yet global knowledge of the river discharges upon which these depend is surprisingly poor (1,2). For much of the world, river gauge measurements are rare, nonexistent, or proprietary.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward global mapping of river discharge using satellite images and at-many-stations hydraulic geometry

Gleason

Smith

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

285

288

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“…Lack of long, continuous time series of observed hydrological data (e.g. Hannah et al, 2011;Stahl et al, 2012), multiple definitions and drought-generating processes (e.g. Van Loon and Van Lanen, 2012), and the incapability of models to include all these processes (e.g.…”

Section: N Wanders and H A J Van Lanen: Future Discharge Droughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Future discharge drought across climate regions around the world modelled with a synthetic hydrological modelling approach forced by three general circulation models

Wanders

Lanen

2015

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Hydrological drought characteristics (drought in groundwater and streamflow) likely will change in the 21st century as a result of climate change. The magnitude and directionality of these changes and their dependency on climatology and catchment characteristics, however, is uncertain. In this study a conceptual hydrological model was forced by downscaled and bias-corrected outcome from three general circulation models for the SRES A2 emission scenario (GCM forced models), and the WATCH Forcing Data set (reference model). The threshold level method was applied to investigate drought occurrence, duration and severity. Results for the control period show that the drought characteristics of each GCM forced model reasonably agree with the reference model for most of the climate types, suggesting that the climate models' results after post-processing produce realistic outcomes for global drought analyses. For the near future (2021-2050) and far future (2071-2100) the GCM forced models show a decrease in drought occurrence for all major climates around the world and increase of both average drought duration and deficit volume of the remaining drought events. The largest decrease in hydrological drought occurrence is expected in cold (D) climates where global warming results in a decreased length of the snow season and an increased precipitation. In the dry (B) climates the smallest decrease in drought occurrence is expected to occur, which probably will lead to even more severe water scarcity. However, in the extreme climate regions (desert and polar), the drought analysis for the control period showed that projections of hydrological drought characteristics are most uncertain. On a global scale the increase in hydrological drought duration and severity in multiple regions will lead to a higher impact of drought events, which should motivate water resource managers to timely anticipate the increased risk of more severe drought in groundwater and streamflow and to design pro-active measures.

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“…The temporal and spatial coverage of gauging stations varies between regions, and observations from small catchments and large river basins cannot be easily compared. Hannah et al [2010Hannah et al [ , 2011 provide a comprehensive overview on various large-scale river flow archives. Examples include the large amount of discharge series available from the U.S. Geological Survey 1 (USGS) which provide also the quality assured observations collected in the Hydro-Climatic Data Network (HCDN) [Slack and Landwehr , 1992] and the Global Runoff Data Center 2 (GRDC) which hosts several data sources, such as discharge series from the worlds largest rivers (e.g.…”

Section: Terrestrial Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial cross‐correlation patterns of European low, mean and high flows

Gudmundsson¹,

Tallaksen²,

Stahl³

2011

Hydrological Processes

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Low and high flows are associated with different hydrological processes. High flows correspond to the direct response of catchments to water input, whereas low flows occur in pronged dry periods and are governed by depleting storages. Therefore, the inter‐annual dynamics of high and low flows are often considered to be independent. To shed light on this assumption, we analysed a pan‐European dataset of 615 streamflow records, summarized as time series of annual streamflow percentiles (5th, 10th, …, 95th). The analysis was based on comparing the spatial cross‐correlation patterns derived from the different percentile series. Their interrelation was visualized by projecting them into a low‐dimensional space. We found that large parts of the cross‐correlations of the percentile series can be summarized by one dominating component. This component represents geographical continuous regions in Europe of correlated streamflow. Departures from this mean pattern occurred for low and high flows and were characterized by the corresponding spatial correlation functions. Generally, spatial correlations appear to be stronger for high flows than for mean flows, particularly for short distances (<400 km). Low flows, on the other hand, have the lowest spatial correlations for short distances. For longer distances (>800 km), this pattern reverses and the spatial correlation of low flows become largest. This discrepancy between low and high flows suggests that hydrological systems are more homogeneously linked to climatic fluctuations under wet conditions. Under dry conditions, local catchment properties appear to play a larger role in translating climatic fluctuations into hydrological response. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Large‐scale river flow archives: importance, current status and future needs

Cited by 334 publications

References 42 publications

Toward global mapping of river discharge using satellite images and at-many-stations hydraulic geometry

Toward global mapping of river discharge using satellite images and at-many-stations hydraulic geometry

Future discharge drought across climate regions around the world modelled with a synthetic hydrological modelling approach forced by three general circulation models

Spatial cross‐correlation patterns of European low, mean and high flows

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