Hydroclimate Volatility On A Warming Earth
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https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00624-z <-- shared 2025 paper
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https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/floods-droughts-fires-hydroclimate-whiplash-speeding-up-globally <-- shared UCLA article, “Floods, Droughts, Then Fires: Hydroclimate Whiplash Is Speeding Up Globally “
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H/T @Daniel Swain
“Hydroclimate volatility refers to sudden, large and/or frequent transitions between very dry and very wet conditions. In this Review, we examine how hydroclimate volatility is anticipated to evolve with anthropogenic warming. Using a metric of ‘hydroclimate whiplash’ based on the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index, global-averaged subseasonal (3-month) and interannual (12-month) whiplash have increased by 31–66% and 8–31%, respectively, since the mid-twentieth century. Further increases are anticipated with ongoing warming, including subseasonal increases of 113% and interannual increases of 52% over land areas with 3 °C of warming; these changes are largest at high latitudes and from northern Africa eastward into South Asia. Extensive evidence links these increases primarily to thermodynamics, namely the rising water-vapour-holding capacity and potential evaporative demand of the atmosphere. Increases in hydroclimate volatility will amplify hazards associated with rapid swings between wet and dry states (including flash floods, wildfires, landslides and disease outbreaks), and could accelerate a water management shift towards co-management of drought and flood risks. A clearer understanding of plausible future trajectories of hydroclimate volatility requires expanded focus on the response of atmospheric circulation to regional and global forcings, as well as land–ocean–atmosphere feedbacks, using large ensemble climate model simulations, storm-resolving high-resolution models and emerging machine learning methods…
#water #hydrology #hydroclimate #whiplash #global #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #weatherwhiplash #ecogeomorphology #sustainability #ecology# ###
#water #hydrology #hydroclimate #volatility #dry #wet #drought #flood #flooding #wildfire #landslide #massmovement #whiplash #global #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #weatherwhiplash #ecogeomorphology #sustainability #ecology #hydrogeomorphology #climatechange #extremeweather #anthropogenicwarming #climate #weather #connection #StandardizedPrecipitationEvapotranspiration #precipitation #rainfall #research #evapotranspiration #risk #hazard #riskassessment #disease #pandemic #publichealth #publicsafety #waterquality #watersecurity #watermanagement #hydrography #atmospheric #regional #global #forcing #climatemodel #model #modeling #AI #machinelearning

Environment Auckland [New Zealand] Data Portal [incl. spatial]
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https://environmentauckland.org.nz/Data <-- shared link to data portal
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https://ourauckland.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/news/2025/09/soe-report-2025/ <-- shared 2025 report link
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https://coastalmonitoringac.netlify.app/ <-- shared Auckland Council Beach Monitoring Program page
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[ancetodal: a VERY long time ago I was an intern Engineering Geologist at the Auckland Council, although it was ARC back then 😊 ]
H/T @David Wright | Senior Field Hydrologist, Hydrology And Data Management Team
“This portal contains primary data from Auckland Council’s State of the Environment monitoring programmes.
Te Kaunihera o Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland Council's Environmental Evaluation and Monitoring Unit carries out environmental monitoring across the region. [They] have been collecting information about Auckland’s environment for more than 30 years and have more than 1,000 monitoring sites across the region. [Their] comprehensive monitoring programmes build a picture of the health of Auckland’s environment, track changes and identify issues...”
#opendata #Auckland #NewZealand #GIS #spatial #mapping #dataportal #localgovernment #publicservice #publicgood #ratepayers #StateoftheEnvironment #monitoringprogrammes #environment #water #hydrology #waterquality #waterresources #intergration #environmentalmonitoring #airquality #coast #coastal #development #construction #engineering #sediment #biology #biodiversity #ecology #habitat #monitoring #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #estuary #river #stream #marine #mitigation #identification
@Auckland Council

Celebrating Academic Excellence: Nine Lecturers at Hawassa University Promoted to Full Professor

Your success is a proud achievement for Hawassa University, Ethiopia, and the global academic community.

https://mylibrarianship.wordpress.com/2026/06/17/celebrating-academic-excellence-nine-lecturers-at-hawassa-university-promoted-to-full-professor/

As permafrost degrades due to climate warming, intensified chemical rock weathering in river catchments creates a geological carbon sink that can significantly offset the biological release of carbon dioxide.
#Biogeochemistry #Climatology #Geomorphology #Hydrology #EarthScience #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/06/es06172602.html

Following up on my recent post about command-line use of TempEst-NEXT, there's now a graphical user interface in version 0.2.2, allowing users to easily generate river temperature predictions anywhere. After installing through the Python package index (pip install --upgrade tempest-next), just run `NEXTapp` or `NEXT --gui` to launch the interface. (Desktop background not included.) #forecasting #rivertemperature #hydrology

Late Miocene Euphrates River Drained Into A Partially Desiccated Eastern Mediterranean
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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-026-01962-x <-- shared paper
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[the paleogeographic reconstruction is outstanding, including the strength and information conveyed so well in that figure, kudos!]
H/T @lina Jakaitė-Darkšė
“Although the Euphrates River - stretching ~3,000 km across Western Asia - has shaped the region’s geology for millions of years, the timing of its origin and the evolution of its course remain enigmatic. So far, two contrasting hypotheses have been proposed to explain the fluvial system’s Late Neogene path: termination in Anatolia at a palaeo-lake or the Mediterranean, or a southeastward continuation to Arabia. Here [they] use seismic-reflection and topographic data to show that two previously identified sedimentary accumulations - deposited during the terminal phase of the Late Miocene Messinian salinity crisis - resulted from dual riverine systems that drained into a partially desiccated eastern Mediterranean before avulsing toward the Persian Gulf and converging to form the modern Euphrates River. From probabilistic sediment-budget modelling, [they] show that although the latest Messinian drainage basins were an order of magnitude smaller than their present-day extents, the total palaeo-discharge exceeded that of the modern Tigris, Euphrates and Nile rivers combined, indicating intense palaeo-precipitation and high palaeo-relief. These results suggest that plate-margin deformation both controlled the fluvial avulsions that diverted the Euphrates River from the Anatolian–Eurasian Plate to the Arabian Plate, and established the conditions necessary for the development of the alluvial Fertile Crescent…”
#water #hydrology #hydrography #paleogeography #Euphrates #river #Miocene #reconstruction #spatialreconstruction #geology #change #erosion #MiddleEast #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #Neogene #Anatolia #paleolake #Mediterranean #Arabia #Messinian #remotesensing #model #modeling #topography #hydrogeomorphology #geomorphology #PersianGulf #sediment #paleodischarge #volume #Tigris #elevation #platetectonics #structuralgeology #platemargin #fluvial #avulsion #FertileCrescent

Urban Flood Observations [UFO] - A Hand-Labeled Training And Validation Dataset Of Post-Flood Inundation
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https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.23066 <-- shared paper
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https://zenodo.org/records/19698577 <-- shared dataset
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H/T @Rohit Mukherjee
“UFO includes 215 high-resolution PlanetScope image chips and corresponding labels from 14 global flood events, with a focus on urban environments. The labels capture visible surface water in post-flood scenes.
Labeling floods from space is hard, especially in urban areas. Building shadows, narrow channels, wet soil, complex drainage features, and mixed pixels all make it difficult. [They] spent a lot of time refining the labels, and [they] think they can be useful for benchmarking flood-mapping methods and for training flood models (if you have PlanetScope access).
As an initial benchmark, [they have] trained a SegFormer model on the dataset and achieved a mean IoU of 77.3% under leave-one-event-out validation, where each flood event was held out entirely from training…”
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“Urban flooding affects lives and infrastructure worldwide. Mapping inundation in complex urban environments from satellite imagery remains challenging due to limited spatial resolution, infrequent acquisitions, and cloud cover. [They] present Urban Flood Observations (UFO), a global, hand-labeled dataset of post-flood inundation in diverse urban settings. UFO comprises 215 image chips (1024 by 1024 pixels) from 14 flood events between 2017 and 2021, derived from 3 metre PlanetScope imagery. Each chip is annotated with two classes: 'inundated' (all visible surface water, including floodwater and pre-existing water bodies (permanent or seasonal)) and 'non-inundated'. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, [they have] trained a segmentation model using leave-one-event-out cross-validation, achieving a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 77.3. [They] also used UFO to evaluate two widely used surface water products, the Sentinel-1-based NASA IMPACT model and Google's 10 m Dynamic World water class, which yielded IoUs of 44.1 and 48.1, respectively. UFO is publicly available to support the development and validation of urban inundation mapping methods…”
#UrbanFloodObservations #Urban #Flood #Observations #flooding #UFO #PlanetScope #remotesensing #GIS #spatial #mapping #opensource #opendata #floodmapping #model #modeling #floodmodels #infrastructure #water #hydrology #extremeweather #hydrography #humanimpacts #cost #economics #risk #hazard #segmentationmodel #elevation #topography #surfacewater #satellite #senteniel #IMPACT #testcases

Scientists See More Vegetation In The Himalayas - But It Is Not Good News, Because That Extra “Green” Can Disrupt Water, Snow, And High-Mountain Biodiversity | Plants Growing Higher Across Himalaya As Climate Warms
(Vegetation On The Move: Elevational Shifts And Greening Dynamics Across The Himalayan Alpine Zone)
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https://www.ecoticias.com/en/scientists-see-more-vegetation-in-the-himalayas-but-it-is-not-good-news-because-that-extra-green-can-disrupt-water-snow-and-high-mountain-biodiversity/33120/ <-- shared technical article
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https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-environment-science-and-economy/earth-and-environmental-science/plants-growing-higher-across-himalaya-as-climate-warms/ <-- shared technical newsitem
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https://doi.org/10.1002/ecog.08259 <-- shared (2026) paper
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https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14919 <-- shared (2020) paper
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“For years, the biggest climate warning from the Himalaya was easy to picture because glaciers were shrinking on the roof of Asia. Now, researchers are pointing to a quieter signal, one that can look almost harmless from a distance. The mountains are getting greener.
New research [link above] shows alpine vegetation moving higher across six Himalayan regions from 1999 to 2022, pushed in part by warming and reduced snow depth. That might sound like nature recovering, but in this fragile landscape, more plant cover at extreme heights may change how snow is stored, how water runs downhill, and how rivers behave for communities far below…”
#GIS #spatial #mapping #remotesensing #earthobservation #satellite #landsat #landcover #NDVI #Himalaya #Nepal #India #Bhutan #climatechange #glacier #vegetation #alpine #level #greening #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #snow #water #ice #hydrography #hydrology #ecosystems #humaninpacts #phenology #model #modeling #HighMountainAsia #greenness #ERA5 #vegetationline #altitude #climatictrends #warming #precipitation #rainfall

The Growing Threat of Flooding on Transportation Infrastructure Across Texas Through 2100
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https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EF008207 <--shared paper
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H/T @Rakibul Ahasan
“[The researchers] modeled flood susceptibility across Texas at 30 m resolution and projected how it shifts through 2100. The headline is not just that flood risk grows, but that it moves, into places current planning and regulatory maps are not watching. The July 2025 Kerrville flooding sat squarely inside the kind of inland hazard expansion this model projects.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
● 95% of new flood exposure by 2100 is inland, away from the coast, shifting the resilience problem into interior river basins that planning has historically deprioritized.
● Where [they] benchmarked against FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer, the model flags substantial hidden risk in rapidly urbanizing peri-urban areas, most notably in Greater Houston.
● Climate change alone expands the flood-susceptible footprint by 10–12% by 2100, before any new road or land-use development, so this is a conservative floor, not a ceiling.
● Half the state's roads and rail and 80% of its bridges already sit in flood-susceptible zones today.
● [They] accounted for both factor-importance and spatial-scale uncertainty, using a Monte Carlo weight-perturbation ensemble and multiscale analysis across nested neighborhoods.
The practical takeaway: this is a statewide screening layer, not a replacement for site-level hydraulic studies. It shows planners and policymakers where the gap between today's protection and tomorrow's risk is widest, and where unmapped peri-urban growth is walking into exposure that regulatory maps still call safe…”
#water #hydrology #hydrography #extremeweather #flood #flooding #Texas #TX #USA #transportation #infrastructure #humanimpacts #risk #hazard #cost #economics #floodsusceptibility #GIS #spatial #mapping #raster #elevation #modeling #model #spatialanalysis #planning #regulation #warning #Kerrville #hazardmapping #floodexposure #inland #coast #urban #urbanisation #development #growth #Houston #lowlying #climatechange #landuse #development #geostatstics #MonteCarlo #regionalscreening #naturalhazard #infrastructureresilience #floodmapping #hydrogeomorphology #geomorphometry #aginginfrastructure