Hydrology articles within Nature Geoscience

Featured

  • Article |

    Abrupt glacial climate changes were slowly communicated between hemispheres by oceanic heat transport. Ice core data point to more rapid atmospheric teleconnections linking the North Atlantic, tropics, and southern storm track.

    • Bradley R. Markle
    • , Eric J. Steig
    •  & Todd Sowers

  • News & Views |

    Increasing groundwater extraction supports hundreds of millions of people across the Indo-Gangetic Basin. Data suggests that despite the increase in withdrawals, groundwater depletion is localized and the most widespread threat is contamination.

    • Scott Fendorf
    •  & Shawn G. Benner

  • Letter |

    Convective precipitation may change in a changing climate. Large eddy simulations of convection with a realistic diurnal cycle suggest that interactions between convective systems and precipitation extremes are influenced by temperature.

    • Christopher Moseley
    • , Cathy Hohenegger
    •  & Jan O. Haerter

  • News & Views |

    Liquid water on Mars may be an agent of surface change, but it is unstable under the thin atmosphere. Experiments suggest water percolating though Martian hillslopes ejects sediment as it boils under the low pressure, and modifies the landscape.

    • Wouter A. Marra

  • Letter |

    Meltwater runoff from the Greenland ice sheet alters ocean surface salinity. Numerical simulations show that meltwater from southeastern Greenland is transported to the Labrador Sea more efficiently than that from southwestern Greenland.

    • Hao Luo
    • , Renato M. Castelao
    •  & Thomas L. Mote

  • Editorial |

    Groundwater flow meddles with hydrological, environmental and geological processes. As water scarcity issues mount for people living above ground, the vast stores of freshwater in the subsurface require research attention.

  • Commentary |

    Drought management is inefficient because feedbacks between drought and people are not fully understood. In this human-influenced era, we need to rethink the concept of drought to include the human role in mitigating and enhancing drought.

    • Anne F. Van Loon
    • , Tom Gleeson
    •  & Henny A. J. Van Lanen

  • Letter |

    Streamflow is a mixture of precipitation of various ages. Oxygen isotope data suggests that a third of global river discharge is sourced from rainfall within the past few months, which accounts for less than 0.1% of global groundwater.

    • Scott Jasechko
    • , James W. Kirchner
    •  & Jeffrey J. McDonnell

  • Letter |

    The sediment load of China’s Yellow River has been declining. Analysis of 60 years of runoff and sediment load data attributes this decline to river engineering, with an increasing role of post-1990s land use changes on the Loess Plateau.

    • Shuai Wang
    • , Bojie Fu
    •  & Yafeng Wang

  • News & Views |

    A global picture of the age structure and flow path of groundwater is lacking. Tritium concentrations and numerical modelling shed light on both the most recently replenished and the longest stored groundwater within Earth's continents.

    • Ying Fan

  • Article |

    Groundwater recharged less than 50 years ago is vulnerable to contamination and land-use changes. Data and simulations suggest that up to 6% of continental groundwater is modern—forming the largest component of the active hydrologic cycle.

    • Tom Gleeson
    • , Kevin M. Befus
    •  & M. Bayani Cardenas

  • Letter |

    Transient streaks that appear seasonally on Martian slopes are consistent with brine flows, but evidence of water or salts has been lacking. Analysis of spectral data reveals hydrated salts associated with the streaks, confirming a briny origin.

    • Lujendra Ojha
    • , Mary Beth Wilhelm
    •  & Matt Chojnacki

  • Commentary |

    Since 1999, China's Grain for Green project has greatly increased the vegetation cover on the Loess Plateau. Now that erosion levels have returned to historic values, vegetation should be maintained but not expanded further as planned.

    • Yiping Chen
    • , Kaibo Wang
    •  & Xinhua He

  • News & Views |

    Braided channels are rare on ocean floors, but abundant on land. Experiments and theory suggest that deeper flows and rapid overbank deposition restrict braiding in underwater rivers relative to their terrestrial counterparts.

    • Jeff Peakall

  • Letter |

    The glaciers in western Canada are experiencing rapid mass loss. Projections of their fate with a model that couples physics-based ice dynamics with a surface mass balance model suggest that glacier volume will shrink by 70% by 2100.

    • Garry K. C. Clarke
    • , Alexander H. Jarosch
    •  & Brian Menounos

  • News & Views |

    The hydrology of the North American west looked very different at the Last Glacial Maximum to today. A model–data comparison suggests the observed precipitation patterns are best explained if the storm track was squeezed and steered by high-pressure systems.

    • Aaron E. Putnam

  • News & Views |

    Instrumental records have hinted that aerosol emissions may be shifting rainfall over Central America southwards. A 450-year-long precipitation reconstruction indicates that this shift began shortly after the Industrial Revolution.

    • Jud Partin

  • News & Views |

    The Sahara was more humid and habitable thousands of years ago. Reconstructions of North African hydroclimate show that the onset of aridity started in the north, with the monsoon rains weakening progressively later at lower latitudes.

    • Peter B. de Menocal

  • Article |

    During the early to mid-Holocene, Africa was more humid than today. Precipitation reconstructions from across Africa suggest that the termination of humidity was spatially variable, moving towards progressively lower latitudes.

    • Timothy M. Shanahan
    • , Nicholas P. McKay
    •  & John Peck

  • News & Views |

    Freshwater deficits and heavy rainfall have been projected to intensify in a warming climate. An analysis of hydrological data suggests that past changes in wet and dry extremes were more complex than a simple amplification of existing patterns.

    • Richard P. Allan

  • Letter |

    Past continental dryness trends are difficult to assess. A comprehensive analysis of hundreds of combinations of data sets suggests that only 24.6% of the global land area have been exposed to robust dryness changes since 1948.

    • Peter Greve
    • , Boris Orlowsky
    •  & Sonia I. Seneviratne

  • Commentary |

    Water availability and use are inherently regional concerns. However, a global-scale approach to evaluating strategies to reduce water stress can help maximize mitigation.

    • Yoshihide Wada
    • , Tom Gleeson
    •  & Laurent Esnault

  • Article |

    Narrow river gorges are often short-lived features. Images of a bedrock gorge in Taiwan, which was carved after 1999, reveal rapid widening where the upstream floodplain meets the gorge, an erosional front that propagates downstream as the gorge is erased.

    • Kristen L. Cook
    • , Jens M. Turowski
    •  & Niels Hovius

  • News & Views |

    Southwest Australia has become increasingly dry over the past century. Simulations with a high-resolution global climate model show that this trend is linked to greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion — and that it is likely to continue.

    • David J. Karoly

  • Letter |

    Precipitation in austral autumn and winter has declined over parts of southern and southwestern Australia. Simulations with a high-resolution climate model reproduce many aspects of the observed rainfall decline as a response to anthropogenic changes in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases and ozone, and project significant further drying for southwest Australia over the twenty-first century.

    • Thomas L. Delworth
    •  & Fanrong Zeng

  • Letter |

    As northern summer solstice nears on Saturn’s moon Titan, dynamic processes on its surface are expected. Recent observations by the Cassini spacecraft reveal transient bright features in or on a Titan sea that are consistent with an ephemeral phenomenon such as waves.

    • J. D. Hofgartner
    • , A. G. Hayes
    •  & C. Wood

  • Letter |

    When basal meltwater refreezes, the resulting warm ice can influence the flow dynamics of the ice sheet above. An analysis of airborne gravity and radar data identifies extensive basal-ice units across the northern Greenland ice sheet that coincide with areas of deformed ice and fast ice flow.

    • Robin E. Bell
    • , Kirsteen Tinto
    •  & John D. Paden

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