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An absence of precipitation combined with drying of the ground through evaporation can deplete fresh water crucial for societies and ecosystems. However, new research highlights a more remote driver of drought.
Research on the ecological impacts of drought has predominantly focused on the scarcity of water supply, often overlooking divergent ecosystem water demands across vegetation types, regions, and time. These diverse ecosystem water demands need to be incorporated into an effective ecological drought monitoring and assessment framework.
This Review highlights the strengths and limitations of deep learning approaches relative to traditional approaches, emphasizing their potential as a currently underutilized yet promising avenue for advancing our understanding of water-quality sciences.
Coagulation plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety of drinking water by removing natural organic matter. A comprehensive investigation of existing coagulation theories at the molecular functional group scale highlights the importance of the properties of natural organic matter on coagulation efficiency and provides valuable insights for predicting and achieving the efficient removal of pollutants by coagulation.
Coastal megacities, such as Shanghai and New York City, exhibit marked disparities in flood evacuation patterns for elderly residents. Risk-informed, strategic storm flood evacuation planning can significantly improve the overall performance of evacuee transfer for large coastal cities.
Irrigation has helped facilitate large gains in crop yields but comes at an increasing cost to water resources, complicating climate change adaptation.
Half of irrigation expansion in the twenty-first century has taken place in water-stressed areas, offering a mixed picture for simultaneously achieving future food security, water sustainability and climate resilience in global agriculture.
Exceptional streamflow and soil moisture conditions now occur on a substantial share of global land area and are much more frequent than in pre-industrial times. This marks a notable transgression of the new planetary boundary for freshwater change.
Rivers carry large quantities of carbon and form an important link between terrestrial, marine and atmospheric biogeochemical cycles, yet our observations of river carbon are severely limited. Here we provide a blueprint to build a global River Observation System that would improve our ability to observe and predict changes in this crucial piece of the global carbon cycle.
When the substrate for ecological interactions is the river network, the emerging universality of form is reflected in its function as ecological corridor, with implications.
Solar desalination has the potential to contribute to the solutions regarding global water scarcity. This Review discusses the road and challenges towards the industrialization of solar desalination plants.
Earth system model projections of vegetation–climate feedback frequently depend on inaccurate values of evaporation sensitivity to vegetation changes, potentially resulting in misleading conclusions. A promising avenue involves improving the transpiration partitioning parameterizations and incorporating groundwater connections to refine the modelled sensitivity.
Self-supervised learning offers a promising way of downscaling the total water storage anomaly data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, contributing to a better understanding of the impact of natural climate variability and human activities at basin scales.
This study introduces a self-supervised data assimilation model with a specifically designed loss function to generate a global total water storage anomalies (TWSA) product at a 0.5° spatial resolution, combining hydrological simulations with Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite measurements.