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R.J. van der Ent

68 records found

Quantification of precipitation partitioning into evaporation and runoff is crucial for predicting future water availability. Within the widely used Budyko framework, which relates the long-term aridity index to the long-term evaporative index, curvilinear relationships between t ...
Tropical rainforests rely on their root systems to access moisture stored in soil during wet periods for use during dry periods. When this root zone soil moisture is inadequate to sustain a forest ecosystem, they transition to a savanna-like state, losing their native structure a ...
Land cover and land management changes (LCLMCs) play an important role in achieving low-end warming scenarios through land-based mitigation. However, their effects on moisture fluxes and recycling remain uncertain, although they have important implications for the future viabilit ...
Vegetation roots play an essential role in regulating the hydrological cycle by removing water from the subsurface and releasing it to the atmosphere. However, the present understanding of the drivers of ecosystem-scale root development and their spatial variability globally is l ...

Flood drivers and trends

A case study of the Geul River catchment (the Netherlands) over the past half century

In July 2021, extreme precipitation caused devastating flooding in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, particularly in the Geul River catchment. Such precipitation extremes had not been previously recorded and were not expected to occur in summer. This contributed to poor flood ...
Vegetation plays a crucial role in regulating the water cycle through transpiration, which is the water flux from the subsurface to the atmosphere via roots. The amount and timing of transpiration is controlled by the interplay of seasonal energy and water supply. The latter stro ...
Human actions compromise the many life-supporting functions provided by the freshwater cycle. Yet, scientific understanding of anthropogenic freshwater change and its long-term evolution is limited. Here, using a multi-model ensemble of global hydrological models, we estimate how ...

EStreams

An integrated dataset and catalogue of streamflow, hydro-climatic and landscape variables for Europe

Large-sample hydrology datasets have become increasingly available, contributing to significant scientific advances. However, in Europe, only a few such datasets have been published, capturing only a fraction of the wealth of information from national data providers in terms of a ...
Root zone soil moisture is a key variable representing water cycle dynamics that strongly interact with ecohydrological, atmospheric, and biogeochemical processes. Recently, it was proposed as the control variable for the green water planetary boundary, suggesting that widespread ...
Global warming impacts the hydrological cycle, affecting the seasonality and timing of extreme precipitation. Understanding historical changes in extreme precipitation occurrence is crucial for assessing their impacts. This study uses relative entropy to analyze historical change ...
Quantifying the magnitude and frequency of extreme precipitation events is key in translating climate observations to planning and engineering design. Past efforts have mostly focused on the estimation of daily extremes using gauge observations. Recent development of high-resolut ...
Vegetation largely controls land surface–atmosphere interactions. Although vegetation is highly dynamic across spatial and temporal scales, most land surface models currently used for reanalyses and near-term climate predictions do not adequately represent these dynamics. This ca ...
Green water — terrestrial precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture — is fundamental to Earth system dynamics and is now extensively perturbed by human pressures at continental to planetary scales. However, green water lacks explicit consideration in the existing planetary bou ...
Achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is contingent on understanding the potential interactions among human and natural systems. In Kenya, the goal of conserving and expanding forest cover to achieve SDG 15 “Life on Land” may be related to other S ...
Forest and savanna ecosystems naturally exist as alternative stable states. The maximum capacity of these ecosystems to absorb perturbations without transitioning to the other alternative stable state is referred to as ‘resilience’. Previous studies have determined the resilience ...
Several safe boundaries of critical Earth system processes have already been crossed due to human perturbations; not accounting for their interactions may further narrow the safe operating space for humanity. Using expert knowledge elicitation, we explored interactions among seve ...
Future rainfall extremes are projected to increase with global warming according to theory and climate models, but common (annual) and rare (decennial or centennial) extremes could be affected differently. Here, using 25 models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase ...
Water consumption along value chains of goods and services has increased globally and led to increased attention on water footprinting. Most global water consumption is accounted for by evaporation (E), which is connected via bridges of atmospheric moisture transport to other reg ...
Plastic waste increasingly accumulates in the marine environment, but data on the distribution and quantification of riverine sources required for development of effective mitigation are limited. Our model approach includes geographically distributed data on plastic waste, land u ...
The 2018 summer drought in Europe was particularly extreme in terms of intensity and impact due to the combination of low rainfall and high temperatures. However, it remains unclear how this drought developed in time and space in such an extreme way. In this study we aimed to get ...