Hydrology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    This work identifies the world’s most vulnerable basins to social and ecological impacts from freshwater stress and storage loss: a set of 168 hotspot basins for global prioritization that encompass 1.5 billion people, 17% of global food crops, 13% of global GDP, and hundreds of significant wetlands.

    • Xander Huggins
    • , Tom Gleeson
    •  & James S. Famiglietti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global glacial chemical denudation is one of the largest contributors to global elemental cycles and, amplified by climate warming, will significantly impact nutrient loads in downstream ecosystems.

    • Xiangying Li
    • , Ninglian Wang
    •  & Guoyu Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors show that hyporheic flow, bed morphology, and bed stability are intimately related, and that this relationship is expressed as distinct locked and segregated states of bedform dynamics, which carries implications for river system behavior in general and the storage of carbon, nutrients, and contaminants in particular.

    • J. Dallmann
    • , C. B. Phillips
    •  & A. I. Packman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In the U.S. today nearly no surface waters are drinkable without treatment. Here, the authors demonstrate that four-fifths of cities that withdraw surface water are supplying water that includes a portion of treated wastewater, concentrated in the Midwest, the South, and Texas.

    • Sean W. D. Turner
    • , Jennie S. Rice
    •  & Landon Marston

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An isotope synthesis of 1257 global lakes revealed on average 20% of inflow is lost to evaporation, but 10% of Earth’s lakes show extreme evaporative losses. Stable water isotope monitoring is an effective way to detect comparative climatic and catchment-scale impacts on lake water-balance budgets.

    • Yuliya Vystavna
    • , Astrid Harjung
    •  & Leonard I. Wassenaar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rapid sub-daily and weekly fluctuations in streamflow are known as hydropeaking. Here, the authors apply a new “weekly hydropeaking index” (WHI) to streamflow data from 500 gauges across the USA and Canada and find that the strength of WHI peaked in the mid-20th century and has been declining through the 2010s.

    • Stephen J. Déry
    • , Marco A. Hernández-Henríquez
    •  & Tara J. Troy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors combine satellite data with hydrologic models to investigate recent changes in pan-Arctic river discharge magnitude, trends, and seasonality for nearly half a million rivers. They reveal that these rivers likely exported 3-17% more water to the global ocean than previously thought from 1984-2018.

    • Dongmei Feng
    • , Colin J. Gleason
    •  & Yuta Ishitsuka

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Thermodynamically, rainfall events are expected to become stronger in a warming climate. Here, the authors demonstrate the importance of dynamical aspects to the temperature-rainfall scaling by quantifying the influence of cyclonic activity that leads to negative scaling over large parts of the tropical oceans.

    • Dominik Traxl
    • , Niklas Boers
    •  & Bodo Bookhagen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flash droughts can have devastating impacts but are notoriously difficult to predict. This study identifies global hotspots of flash drought, driven by evaporative demand and precipitation deficits across varying geographic regions and crop-type, providing a framework for flash drought prediction.

    • Jordan I. Christian
    • , Jeffrey B. Basara
    •  & Robb M. Randall

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Much effort is invested in calibrating model parameters for accurate outputs, but established methods can be inefficient and generic. By learning from big dataset, a new differentiable framework for model parameterization outperforms state-of-the-art methods, produce more physically-coherent results, using a fraction of the training data, computational power, and time. The method promotes a deep integration of machine learning with process-based geoscientific models.

    • Wen-Ping Tsai
    • , Dapeng Feng
    •  & Chaopeng Shen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Integrating river system and economy-wide models in a dynamic, iterative, bidirectional fashion allows assessing some economic impacts of interventions in river systems. Here the authors use this framework to compare water resources management strategies for the Nile in a quest for efficient use of the river’s limited and stressed water resources.

    • Mohammed Basheer
    • , Victor Nechifor
    •  & Julien J. Harou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The global water demands of irrigated agriculture are estimated through country surveys or through hydrological models, but both approaches are taxing. Here, the authors show that they can simply be estimated as a function of irrigated areas.

    • Arnald Puy
    • , Emanuele Borgonovo
    •  & Andrea Saltelli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A historical reconstruction of water use in Egypt shows the change in relative use of Nile water versus virtual water import, especially in the highly consumptive agriculture sector. A range of future projections of water demand are offered based on several plausible socioeconomic scenarios.

    • Catherine A. Nikiel
    •  & Elfatih A. B. Eltahir

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Freshwater salinisation is a growing water quality problem, but impacts and drivers across regional to global scales have been lacking. A new assessment of inter-regional freshwater salinisation demonstrates the importance of irrigation as a driver of salinisation.

    • Josefin Thorslund
    • , Marc F. P. Bierkens
    •  & Michelle T. H. van Vliet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbes that colonise ice sheet surfaces are important to the carbon cycle, but their biomass and transport remains unquantified. Here, the authors reveal substantial microbial carbon fluxes across Greenland’s ice surface, in quantities that may sustain subglacial heterotrophs and fuel methanogenesis.

    • T. D. L. Irvine-Fynn
    • , A. Edwards
    •  & A. Hubbard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Jiao et al. conducted a comprehensive evaluation of changes in water constraint on vegetation growth in the extratropical Northern Hemisphere between 1982 and 2015. They document a significant increase in vegetation water constraint over the last three decades.

    • Wenzhe Jiao
    • , Lixin Wang
    •  & Paolo D’Odorico

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Filling of dams, when coinciding with droughts, can lead to severe downstream hydrology and ecology problems. The authors hence here provide a multisectoral perspective, using a dam in Ethiopia as an example, to develop adaptive filling solutions that support decision making, favourable filling timing and an effective filling policy.

    • Marta Zaniolo
    • , Matteo Giuliani
    •  & Andrea Castelletti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Glaciers in High Mountain Asia are a key water resource. The authors use remote sensing data and a regional implementation of the continuity equation to quantify glacier ablation and accumulation rates for 2000–2016, and establish current climatic-geometric imbalances that imply strong reductions in ice volume by 2100.

    • Evan Miles
    • , Michael McCarthy
    •  & Francesca Pellicciotti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Most studies have examined the impacts of human-driven climate change on mean or extreme climate variables and have neglected to explore interrelated drought features. Here, the authors show that the presence of human activity has increased the number and maximum length and intensity of drought events across the globe.

    • Felicia Chiang
    • , Omid Mazdiyasni
    •  & Amir AghaKouchak

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors investigate the impacts of wildfires on fluvial networks in the western US. They find that wildfires directly impacted ~6% of the total stream length between 1984 and 2014. When longitudinal propagation was included, they estimate that wildfires affected ~11% of the total stream length.

    • Grady Ball
    • , Peter Regier
    •  & David Van Horn

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The long-term impact of extreme surface melt on the Greenland Ice Sheet is poorly constrained. Here the authors use airborne radar to characterize a subsurface refrozen melt layer that formed following extreme melt in 2012, showing that it likely reduced drainage pathways for subsequent melt.

    • Riley Culberg
    • , Dustin M. Schroeder
    •  & Winnie Chu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impacts of water scarcity depend on physical basin characteristics and global economic dynamics. Here, the authors show scenario assumptions can yield either highly positive or negative economic impacts due to water scarcity, and the drivers of these impacts are basin-specific and cannot be determined a priori.

    • Flannery Dolan
    • , Jonathan Lamontagne
    •  & Jae Edmonds

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Based on the analysis of chemical maps of Thorium and Potassium derived in the Eridania region on Mars, the authors show how radiogenic heat driven hydrothermal systems may have persisted on Mars.

    • Lujendra Ojha
    • , Suniti Karunatillake
    •  & Jacob Buffo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Groundwater discharge generates streamflow and influences stream thermal regimes. Classifying more than 1700 streams across the US by using an empirically-based approach the study shows that the vulnerability of streams to stressors depends on the aquifer source-depth of groundwater discharge

    • Danielle K. Hare
    • , Ashley M. Helton
    •  & Martin A. Briggs

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global flood risk is assessed in this study; in particular, the authors describe, based on a modeling approach, the positive effect of river dams on mitigating flood hazards to people.

    • Julien Boulange
    • , Naota Hanasaki
    •  & Yadu Pokhrel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Groundwater discharge is a mechanism that transports chemicals from inland systems to the ocean, but it has been considered of secondary influence compared to rivers. Here the authors assess the global significance of groundwater discharge, finding that it has a unique and important contribution to ocean chemistry and Earth-system models.

    • Kimberley K. Mayfield
    • , Anton Eisenhauer
    •  & Adina Paytan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Excess fertilizer use causes subsurface contamination. Here, the authors conduct an assessment of water quality vulnerability across Europe, finding that 75% of agricultural regions are susceptible to nitrate contamination for least one-third of the year, two times more than using standard estimation procedure.

    • R. Kumar
    • , F. Heße
    •  & S. Attinger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study investigates flood hazards of the Brahmaputra River, Bangladesh. Based on a tree ring reconstruction of seasonal river discharge, climate modelling, and historic documentation of flood events, the authors suggest flood hazard risk is underestimated by ~24–38% in the present day compared to the past 700 years.

    • Mukund P. Rao
    • , Edward R. Cook
    •  & Peter J. Webster

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Monsoon systems have strong impacts on precipitation and food security over large areas of the world. Here, the authors show that plant responses to rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere play a key role in modulating seasonal rainfall and water resources over global land monsoon regions.

    • Jiangpeng Cui
    • , Shilong Piao
    •  & Gabriel J. Kooperman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Trough mouth fans are created via repeated glacigenic sediment transport from ice sheets. Here the authors use 3D seismic reflection data to present a formation model for the North Sea Fan and find that exceptionally large volumes of meltwater may mean that freshwater supply is underestimated during glacial cycles.

    • Benjamin Bellwald
    • , Sverre Planke
    •  & Reidun Myklebust

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The hydroclimatic variations of the Amazon River basin can exert profound impacts on the marine ecosystem in the Amazon plume region. Here the authors show that an amplified seasonal cycle of Amazonia precipitation during 1979–2018 leads to enhanced seasonality in both Amazon river discharge and ocean salinity.

    • Yu-Chiao Liang
    • , Min-Hui Lo
    •  & John D. Steffen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prior studies mapping climatologically suitable areas for malaria transmission have used relatively simple thresholds for precipitation. Here the authors show that when models incorporate hydrological processes a more complex pattern of malaria suitability emerges in Africa and future shifts in suitability are more pronounced.

    • M. W. Smith
    • , T. Willis
    •  & C. J. Thomas

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