Water resources articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change will affect both the demand for electrical power and the generating capabilities of hydropower plants. Here the authors investigated the combined impact of these effects in the US Pacific Northwest by considering the dynamics of the regional  power grid, where they reveal a profound impact of climate change on power shortfall risk by the year 2035.

    • S. W. D. Turner
    • , N. Voisin
    •  & M. Jourabchi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Better understanding of the determinants of residential water demand is important for Tropical Asian countries. Here the author studied how Singapore household electricity use from appliances modify weather-induced water demand and found that residential water and electricity demand respond differently to heat across different income groups.

    • Alberto Salvo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Solar steam generation is limited by fouling of solar converters, and the steam temperature is usually pinned to 100 °C. Here, both limitations are overcome in a system utilizing a solar absorber and light down-converter to achieve radiative heating, which does not require physical contact between absorber and water.

    • Thomas A. Cooper
    • , Seyed H. Zandavi
    •  & Gang Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Investment in watershed services programs is growing, however the factors that contribute to sustainability of such programs are unclear. Here the authors use a large database of cities around the world to show that payment schemes are more likely to be present in watersheds with more agricultural land and less protected areas.

    • Chelsie L. Romulo
    • , Stephen Posner
    •  & Robert I. McDonald

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Groundwater resources are coming under increasing pressure leading to water quality loss. Here, the authors find that recent groundwater pumping has led to increasing arsenic concentrations in the San Joaquin Valley, California aquifers from arsenic residing in the pore water of clay strata released by overpumping.

    • Ryan Smith
    • , Rosemary Knight
    •  & Scott Fendorf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Wildland fire seasons in the United States are getting longer, yet the impacts of fire on water availability at the regional scale are unclear. Here the authors show that fire increased annual river flow throughout the West, while prescribed burns in the subtropical Southeast had limited impact on river flow.

    • Dennis W. Hallema
    • , Ge Sun
    •  & Steven G. McNulty

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Land surface models often use a spatially uniform air temperature threshold when partitioning rain and snow. Here Jennings et al. show that the threshold varies significantly across the Northern Hemisphere and that threshold selection is a large source of uncertainty in snowfall simulations.

    • Keith S. Jennings
    • , Taylor S. Winchell
    •  & Noah P. Molotch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cool roofs have been shown to mitigate heat in urban areas, but their impact on water conservation has not been examined. Here the authors conduct simulations with an urban canopy model to show that implementation of cool roofs in California can also reduce outdoor water consumption by up to 9%.

    • Pouya Vahmani
    •  & Andrew D. Jones

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Significant amounts of different perchlorate salts have been discovered on the surface of Mars. Here, the authors show that magnesium perchlorate has a major impact on water structure in solution, providing insight into how an aqueous fluid might exist under the sub-freezing conditions present on Mars.

    • Samuel Lenton
    • , Natasha H. Rhys
    •  & Lorna Dougan

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