In 2013, the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (lAHS) launched the hydrological decade 2013-2022 with the theme "Panta Rhei; Change in Hydrology and Society". The decade recognizes the urgency of hydrological research to understand and predict the interactions of society and water, to support sustainable water resource use under changing climatic and environmental conditions. This paper reports on the first Panta Rhei biennium 2013-2015, providing a comprehensive resource that describes the scope and direction of Panta Rhei. We bring together the knowledge of all the Panta Rhei working groups, to summarize the most pressing research questions and how the hydrological community is progressing towards those goals. We draw out interconnections between different strands of research, and reflect on the need to take a global view on hydrology in the current era of human impacts and environmental change. Finally, we look back to the six driving science questions identified at the outset of Panta Rhei, to quantify progress towards those aims. @en

Root zone storage capacity ( S r ) is an important variable for hydrology and climate studies, as it strongly influences the hydrological functioning of a catchment and, via evaporation, the local climate. Despite its importance, it remains difficult to obtain a well-founded catchment representative estimate. This study tests the hypothesis that vegetation adapts its S r to create a buffer large enough to sustain the plant during drought conditions of a certain critical strength (with a certain probability of exceedance). Following this method, S r can be estimated from precipitation and evaporative demand data. The results of this ‘‘climate-based method’’ are compared with traditional estimates from soil data for 32 catchments in New Zealand. The results show that the differences between catchments in climate-derived catchment represen- tative S r values are larger than for soil-derived S r values. Using a model experiment, we show that the climate-derived S r can better reproduce hydrological regime signatures for humid catchments; for more arid catchments, the soil and climate methods perform similarly. This makes the climate-based S r a valuable addition for increasing hydrological understanding and reducing hydrological model uncertainty. @en

The catchment representative root zone storage capacity (Sr), i.e. the plant available soil water, is an important parameter of hydrological systems. It does not only influence the runoff from catchments, by controlling the partitioning of water fluxes but it also influences the local climate, by providing the source for transpiration. Sr is difficult to observe at catchment scale, due to heterogeneities in vegetation and soils. Sr estimates are traditionally derived from soil characteristics and estimates of root depths. In contrast, a recently suggested method allows the determination of Sr based on climate data, i.e. precipitation and evaporation, alone (Gao et al., 2014). By doing so, the time-variable size of Sr, is explicitly accounted for, which is not the case for traditional soil based methods. The time-variable size of Sr reflects root growth and thus the vegetation’s adaption to medium-term fluctuations in the climate. Thus, we tested and compared Sr estimates from this ’climate based method’ with estimates from soil data for 32 catchments in New Zealand. The results show a larger range in climate derived Sr than in soil derived Sr. Using a model experiment, we show that a model using the climate derived Sr is more accurately able to reproduce a set of hydrological regime signatures, in particular for humid catchments. For more arid catchments, the two methods provide similar model results. This implies that, although soil database information has some predictive power for model soil storage capacity, climate has a similar or greater control on Sr, as climate affects the evolving hydrological functioning of the root zone at the time scale of hydrological interest. In addition, Sr represents the plant available water and thus root surface, volume and density, and is therefore a more complete descriptor of vegetation influence on water fluxes than mere root depth. On balance, the results indicate that climate has a higher explanatory power than soils for catchment representative root zone storage capacity. @en