Descriptor variables of the root zone storage capacity in Canada

The root zone storage capacity is a critical determinant in hydrology, playing a major role in the partitioning of precipitation into evaporation and runoff. Besides, it is an important parameter in climatological and hydrological models. Understanding of the root zone storage capacity and its major determining processes is therefore fundamental...

The hydrological change under extreme drought in the United States: Separating climate and landscape impacts

Current climate change characterized by increasing temperature has led to an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme droughts that have more prolonged and profound ecohydrological and social impacts. By paying attention to the hydrological change before and after extreme drought and the patterns of drought recovery of ecohydrological...

Evaluating the effects of different land uses on evaporation and stream flow: A study across 200 catchments in the United States

Studying the effects of different land uses on evaporation and stream flow is a hot and frontier topic in global hydrological research. The occurrence and development of flood disasters are restricted and affected by many factors such as meteorology, hydrology, underlying surfaces and human activities. In recent decades, the changes of...

Influence of Climate and Vegetation on Root Zone Storage Capacity: A case study in Australia

Root zone storage capacity Sr is a significant variable for hydrology and climate studies, as it strongly influences the hydrological behaviour of a catchment. A climate-derived method (water-balance between precipitation and transpiration) was applied for estimating Sr values for 113 catchments in Australia. Various climate, hydrological and...

Spatiotemporal snow pattern in the Qilian Mountains from 2001 to 2018

In many parts of the world, water retained in snowpack and glaciers are critical to the stability of downstream ecosystems and human society. This study sets out to quantify, map, and explain the spatiotemporal pattern of annual snow cover duration, which are quantified by regional differences in the number of annual snow cover days (Dsc) and...

Water Balance of the Maurikse Wetering

The Maurikse Wetering is a tributary of the Line river in the centre of the Netherlands. As the catchment is situated between and in close proximity to the larger Nederrijn and Waal rivers, intercatchment groundwater flow (IGF; groundwater flow crossing topographic divides) might have a significant influence on the water balance of the Maurikse...

Time varying climate derived root zone storage capacity: A method to explain the rainfall-runoff anomalies of the Meuse catchment?

The Meuse river basin covers an area of 33,000 km2, touches five countries and is a major communication route in Europe. It is one of the catchments with longest streamflow records, with daily measures of discharge dating back to the beginning of the previous century. Attempts to model streamflow with standard hydrological models revealed that...

Assessing the effect of reservoir operation on seasonal flooding of the Masaka wetland, Rwanda

Fluvial flooding is a recurring phenomenon in Rwanda due to a combination of climate, topography and human interventions. This poses a hazard to human lives and infrastructure, particularly in low-lying areas adjacent to major rivers. An example of such areas is the Masaka wetland, located in the southern edge of the capital Kigali along the...

The challenge of parameter uncertainty: Finding parameter distributions from hydrological field data for conceptual rainfall-runoff models

Conceptual hydrological model parameters represent characteristics of a catchment. They are an integration of spatial heterogeneous parts of the system. Finding adequate parameter values based on field observations, which represents the heterogeneity of a catchment on the spatial resolution and scale of the model, is considered challenging since...

Root-zone storage and snow cover effects: A catchment study on the dynamic behaviour of the root-zone moisture capacity related to changing snow cover patterns

Extreme weather events seem to happen more often nowadays. One of these extreme events was the California Drought between 2012 and 2016. The socioeconomic and environmental impacts of this drought were enormous:<br/>thousands square kilometers of agricultural land fallowed, thousands of lost jobs, salinization problems and forest fires. As a...

Application of Bayesian Networks to Estimate River Discharges in Ecuador

Ecuadorian cities that are located near banks of rivers or near the sea and that have low elevation respect to sea level are more exposed to floods (MIDUVI, 2015). This research will focus on the study of the Guayas river basin, which encloses the city of Guayaquil, the most populated city of the country with 2’578.201 inhabitants where 993.123...

Formulation of transport in a catchment-scale conceptual model

Standard conceptual hydrological models can rarely accommodate stream tracer dynamics at the catchmentscale. They rely on the generation of runoff through the propagation of a pressure wave and do not accountfor the actual advective movement of particles. Over the last years different model frameworks have beendeveloped to account for this...