Hydrology articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    For the first time, climate change experiments with a convection-permitting model have been carried out over an Africa-wide domain. These show more severe future changes in both wet and dry extremes over Africa compared to a traditional coarser resolution climate model.

    • Elizabeth J. Kendon
    • , Rachel A. Stratton
    •  & Catherine A. Senior

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Water isotope modelling is an important tool in climate reconstructions, but there remain gaps in our understanding of the effects upon oxygen and hydrogen isotope fractionation, and thus the source of the deposited signal. Here, the authors present a dataset assembled over two years that shows deuterium excess is controlled by humidity and sea surface temperature, and oxygen and hydrogen isotopes as well as deuterium excess are controlled by sublimation of snow in sea-ice regions.

    • Jean-Louis Bonne
    • , Melanie Behrens
    •  & Martin Werner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forecasting drought and its impact on agriculture and ecosystems is challenged by a lack of knowledge of vegetation access to deep moisture. Here the authors show that combining vegetation and water storage remote sensing can be used to infer this knowledge, allowing drought impact forecasts months in advance.

    • Siyuan Tian
    • , Albert I. J. M. Van Dijk
    •  & Luigi J. Renzullo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The underlying mechanisms structuring dissolved organic matter (DOM) composition and reactivity in rivers remain poorly quantified. Here, the authors pair mass spectrometry and fluorescence spectroscopy to show that hydrology and river geomorphology both shape molecular patterns in DOM composition.

    • Laurel M. Lynch
    • , Nicholas A. Sutfin
    •  & Matthew D. Wallenstein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ocean warming contributes to the thinning of the Antarctic ice shelves, however, lack of observations has prevented a quantification of this contribution. Here the authors use geological records to show that 0.3–1.5 °C ocean warming has played a central role on regional ice shelf instability over the last 9000 years.

    • Johan Etourneau
    • , Giovanni Sgubin
    •  & Jung-Hyun Kim

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Storm runoff extremes dominate flash flood formation and generation, posing a grand threat to ecosystems and communities across the world. Here the authors show that current projected response of these storm runoff extremes to climate and anthropogenic changes are underestimated.

    • Jiabo Yin
    • , Pierre Gentine
    •  & Shenglian Guo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The interaction between seasonally-induced non-tectonic and tectonic deformation along the Himalayan plate boundary is still debated. Here, the authors propose that seasonal hydrological loading can influence tectonic deformation along this plate boundary using continuous GPS measurements and satellite data.

    • Dibyashakti Panda
    • , Bhaskar Kundu
    •  & Amit Kumar Bansal

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reinjection of saltwater, co-produced with oil, has the potential to trigger damaging earthquakes. Here, using Oklahoma and Kansas as an example, the authors present a new physics-based methodology to forecast future probabilities of potentially damaging induced-earthquakes in space and time.

    • Cornelius Langenbruch
    • , Matthew Weingarten
    •  & Mark D. Zoback

  • Article
    | Open Access

    River networks worldwide follow the emblematic Hack’s Law, which expresses the length of a stream as a function of its watershed area. Here the authors show this law does not depend on lithology or rainfall, but on the shape of watersheds and confirms the self-similarity of river networks.

    • Timothée Sassolas-Serrayet
    • , Rodolphe Cattin
    •  & Matthieu Ferry

  • Article
    | Open Access

    River capture acts as one river steals the neighboring headwaters, which is a dramatic natural process for mountain landscapes evolution. Here the authors show a stream piracy reversed flow in a major river resulting in waterfall formation, bedrock gorge incision, and widespread topographic disequilibrium.

    • Niannian Fan
    • , Zhongxin Chu
    •  & Xingnian Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The partitioning of drought-induced water deficits into blue-water runoff and green-water evapotranspiration is critical, as the respective anomalies threaten different societal sectors. Here the authors show that drought reduces runoff much faster and stronger than it reduces evapotranspiration across European climates.

    • René Orth
    •  & Georgia Destouni

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Earthquakes rarely affect hydrothermal systems in non-magmatic context. Here the authors report outbursts of CO2 and hydrothermal disturbances triggered by the 2015 Nepal earthquake, revealing high sensitivity of Himalayan hydrothermal systems to co-, post- and possibly pre- seismic deformation.

    • Frédéric Girault
    • , Lok Bijaya Adhikari
    •  & Frédéric Perrier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rivers and streams are important sources of carbon dioxide and methane; however, the drivers of these streambed gas fluxes are poorly understood. Here, the authors show that temperature sensitivity of streambed greenhouse gas emissions varies with substrate, organic matter content and geological origin.

    • Sophie A. Comer-Warner
    • , Paul Romeijn
    •  & Stefan Krause

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lakes, reservoirs, and other ponded waters are common in large river basins yet their influence on nitrogen budgets is often indistinct. Here, the authors show how a ponded waters’ relative size, shape, and degree of connectivity to the river network control nitrogen removal.

    • Noah M. Schmadel
    • , Judson W. Harvey
    •  & Durelle Scott

  • 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

    Flooding may cause loss of life and economic damage, therefore temporal changes need assessment. Here, the authors show that since 1870 there has been an increase in area inundated by floods in Europe, but a reduction in fatalities and economic losses, although caution that smaller floods remain underreported.

    • Dominik Paprotny
    • , Antonia Sebastian
    •  & Sebastiaan N. Jonkman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In recent years, there has been an ongoing discussion about the hydroclimatic changes over Europe. Here, the authors show that since the beginning of the 20th century, hydroclimatic conditions have shifted to their millennial boundaries, remaining at these extreme levels for a period of unprecedented duration.

    • Y. Markonis
    • , M. Hanel
    •  & E. R. Cook

  • 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

    Climate change can drive local climates outside the range of their historical variability, straining the adaptive capacity of ecological communities. Here the authors show dependencies between climate variables can produce larger and earlier departures from natural variability than is detectable in individual variables.

    • Colin R. Mahony
    •  & Alex J. Cannon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The morphology and abundance of streams control the rates of hydraulic and biogeochemical exchange between streams, groundwater and the atmosphere. Here, the authors show that stream hydromorphology is predictable within headwater catchments with implications for stream-atmosphere gas exchange estimates.

    • George H. Allen
    • , Tamlin M. Pavelsky
    •  & Colin J. Gleason

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Changes in climatology and perturbation will lead to different impacts on regional climate change, but their effect remains a subject of debate. Here the authors develop a new downscaling procedure that reveals the importance of both changes on the regional climate and examines their nonlinear effect.

    • Sachiho A. Adachi
    • , Seiya Nishizawa
    •  & Hirofumi Tomita

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human and environmental water needs can come into conflict in dam-regulated river systems. Here, Chen and Olden investigate the potential for the use of fish–flow modeling to make recommendations for the management of native and nonnative fish species whilst providing water for society.

    • William Chen
    •  & Julian D. Olden

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current global-scale nitrogen (N) budgets quantifying anthropogenic impacts on the N cycle do not explicitly consider nitrate storage in the vadose zone. Here, using estimates of depth to groundwater and nitrate leaching between 1900–2000, the authors show that the vadose zone is an important store of nitrate.

    • M. J. Ascott
    • , D. C. Gooddy
    •  & A. M. Binley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In the Gale Crater on Mars, organic matter has been detected, but in much lower concentrations than expected. Here, the authors conduct clay mineral synthesis experiments which suggest that clay minerals may rapidly form under oxidized conditions and thus explain the low organic concentrations in Gale Crater.

    • Seth R. Gainey
    • , Elisabeth M. Hausrath
    •  & Courtney L. Bartlett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Downslope sediment transport on Mars is reported, but the transport capacity of unstable water under low pressures is not well understood. Here, the authors present a newly discovered, highly reactive transportation mechanism that is only possible under low pressure environments.

    • Jan Raack
    • , Susan J. Conway
    •  & Manish R. Patel

  • 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

    Climate models repeatedly show a warm and dry bias over the central United States, but the origin of this bias remains unclear. Here the authors associate this bias to precipitation deficits in models and after applying a correction, projected precipitation in this region shows no significant changes.

    • Yanluan Lin
    • , Wenhao Dong
    •  & Yong Luo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Globally diarrheal disease through contaminated water sources is a major cause of child mortality. Here, the authors compile a database of 293,362 children in 35 countries and find that upstream tree cover is linked to a lower probability of diarrheal disease and that increasing tree cover may lower mortality.

    • Diego Herrera
    • , Alicia Ellis
    •  & Taylor H. Ricketts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Against the backdrop of a declining monsoon, the number of extreme rain events is on the rise over central India. Here the authors identify a threefold increase in widespread extreme rains over the region during 1950–2015, driven by an increasing variability of the low-level westerlies over the Arabian Sea.

    • M. K. Roxy
    • , Subimal Ghosh
    •  & M. Rajeevan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The evaporation of water represents an alternative source of renewable energy. Building on previous models of evaporation, Cavusoglu et al. show that the power available from this natural resource is comparable to wind and solar power, yet it does not suffer as much from varying weather conditions.

    • Ahmet-Hamdi Cavusoglu
    • , Xi Chen
    •  & Ozgur Sahin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Earth system model simulations of future climate in the Amazon show little agreement. Here, the authors show that biases in internally generated climate explain most of this uncertainty and that the balance between water-saturated and water-limited evapotranspiration controls the Amazon resilience to climate change.

    • Anders Ahlström
    • , Josep G. Canadell
    •  & Robert B. Jackson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impact of climate change on phosphorus (P) loss from land to water is unclear. Here, the authors use P flux data, climate simulations and P transfer models to show that only large scale agricultural change will limit the effect of climate change on average winter P loads in three catchments across the UK.

    • M. C. Ockenden
    • , M. J. Hollaway
    •  & P. M. Haygarth

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The response of the coupled carbon and water cycles to anthropogenic climate change is unclear. Here, the authors show that terrestrial carbon uptake increased significantly from 1982 to 2011 and that this increase is largely driven by increased water-use efficiency, rather than an increase in water use.

    • Lei Cheng
    • , Lu Zhang
    •  & Yongqiang Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global warming and hydropower regulations are major threats to future fresh-water availability and biodiversity. Here, the authors show that their impact on flow regime over a large landmass result in similar changes, but hydropower is more critical locally and may have potential for climate adaptation in floodplains.

    • B. Arheimer
    • , C. Donnelly
    •  & G. Lindström

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The sensitivity of global precipitation to warming is largely governed by changes in atmospheric longwave radiation, a function of cloud cover. Here the authors show that tightening of the tropical circulation with warming drives a decrease in high cloud cover, resulting in higher precipitation changes.

    • Hui Su
    • , Jonathan H. Jiang
    •  & Yuk L. Yung

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rivers provide a major pathway for ocean plastic waste, but effective mitigation is dependent on a quantification of active sources. Here, the authors present a global model of riverine plastic inputs, and estimate annual plastic waste of almost 2.5 million tonnes, with 86% sourced from Asia.

    • Laurent C. M. Lebreton
    • , Joost van der Zwet
    •  & Julia Reisser

Browse broader subjects

Browse Hydrology across other nature.com journals