Estimating Water Balance Components of Lakes and Reservoirs Using Various Open Access Satellite Databases

There are millions of lakes and ten thousands of reservoirs in the world. The number of reservoirs is still increasing through the construction of large dams to meet the growing demand for water resources, hydroelectricity and economic development. Accurate information on the water balance components of lakes and reservoirs is deemed necessary...

A new view on the hydrological cycle over continents

Where does precipitation come from? It is not easy to answer this question because of the complex and energy-intensive processes that bring moisture to a certain location and cause moisture to precipitate highly heterogeneously in space and variable over time. Part of the precipitation comes from so-called “moisture recycling”, which is moisture...

Surface energy balance and actual evapotranspiration of the transboundary Indus Basin estimated from satellite measurements and the ETLook model

The surface energy fluxes and related evapotranspiration processes across the Indus Basin were estimated for the hydrological year 2007 using satellite measurements. The new ETLook remote sensing model (version 1) infers information on actual Evaporation (E) and actual Transpiration (T) from combined optical and passive microwave sensors, which...

A resonating rainfall and evaporation recorder

We propose a novel, accurate quantification of precipitation and evaporation, as needed to understand fundamental hydrologic processes. Our system uses a collection vessel placed on top of a slender rod that is securely fixed at its base. As the vessel is deflected, either by manual perturbation or ambient forcing (for example, wind), its...

Understanding water resources conditions in data scarce river basins using intelligent pixel information, Case: Transboundary Indus Basin

Analytical derivation of the Budyko curve based on rainfall characteristics and a simple evaporation model

The Budyko curve is often used to estimate the actual evaporation as a function of the aridity index in a catchment. Different empirical equations exist to describe this relationship; however, these equations have very limited physical background. The model concept presented in this paper is physically based and uses only measurable parameters....