Increasing amounts of water are used for agriculture. Therefore, we looked into how irrigation requirements will evolve under a changing climate over Europe. Our results show that, by the end of the century and under high emissions, irrigation water will increase by 30 % on average compared to the year 2000. Also, the irrigation requirement is likely to vary more from 1 year to another. However, if emissions are mitigated, these effects are reduced.

Patchy agricultural landscapes have a large number of small fields, which are separated by linear features such as roads and field borders. When eroded sediments are transported out of the agricultural fields by surface runoff, these features can influence sediment connectivity. By use of measured data and a simulation model, we demonstrate how a dense road network (and its drainage system) facilitates sediment transport from fields to water courses in a patchy Swiss agricultural catchment.

In arid areas, the processes of water storage have not been fully understood in different vegetation zones in mountainous areas. This study monitored the stable isotopes in the precipitation and soil water of the Xiying River Basin. In the four vegetation zones, soil water evaporation intensities were mountain grassland > deciduous forest > coniferous forest > alpine meadow, and soil water storage capacity was alpine meadow > deciduous forest > coniferous forest > mountain grassland.

We used satellite imagery to measure monthly reservoir water volumes for 6695 reservoirs worldwide for 1984–2015. We investigated how changing precipitation, streamflow, evaporation, and human activity affected reservoir water storage. Almost half of the reservoirs showed significant increasing or decreasing trends over the past three decades. These changes are caused, first and foremost, by changes in precipitation rather than by changes in net evaporation or dam release patterns.

We propose a hillslope clustering approach based on the seasonal changes in groundwater levels and test its performance by comparing it to several common clustering approaches (aridity index, topographic wetness index, elevation, land cover, and machine-learning clustering). The proposed approach is robust as it reasonably categorizes hillslopes with similar elevation, land cover, hydroclimate, land surface processes, and subsurface hydrodynamics, hence a similar hydrologic function.

This study investigated the wetting and drying of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) from variations in soil moisture (SM) droughts. We found the TP experienced an abrupt and significant wetting shift in the middle to late 1990s, not merely the steady trends given in literature. This shift is dominated by precipitation and attributed to the North Atlantic Oscillation. The wetting shift indicates a climate regime change. Our innovative work provides implications for further knowledge of the TP climate.

Agricultural drought forecasting lies at the core of overall drought risk management and is critical for food security and drought early warning. Using three-dimensional scenarios, we attempted to compare the agricultural drought forecast performance of a canonical vine copula (3C-vine) model and meta-Gaussian (MG) model over China. The findings show that the 3C-vine model exhibits more skill than the MG model when using 1– to 3-month lead times for forecasting agricultural drought.

In this work, we introduce a methodology for devising reliable future high streamflow scenarios from climate change simulations. The calibration of a hydrological model is carried out to maximize the probability that the modeled and observed high flow extremes belong to the same statistical population. Application to the Adige River catchment (southeastern Alps, Italy) showed that this procedure produces reliable quantiles of the annual maximum streamflow for use in assessment studies.

An in-depth investigation was conducted of all rainfall-partitioning components at inter- and intra-event scales for two xerophytic shrubs. Inter-event rainfall partitioning amount and percentage depended more on rainfall amount, and rainfall intensity and duration controlled intra-event rainfall-partitioning variables. One shrub has larger branch angle, small branch and smaller canopy area to produce stemflow more efficiently, and the other has larger biomass to intercept more rainfall.

The accelerated climate warming in the Tibetan Plateau after 1997 has strong consequences for hydrology, geography, and social wellbeing. In hydrology, the change in streamflow as a result of changes in dynamic water storage originating from glacier melt and permafrost thawing in a warming climate directly affects the available water resources for societies of some of the most populated nations in the world.

This work shows advances in high-resolution satellite data for hydrology. We performed hydrological simulations for the Po River basin using various satellite products, including precipitation, evaporation, soil moisture, and snow depth. Evaporation and snow depth improved a simulation based on high-quality ground observations. Interestingly, a model calibration relying on satellite data skillfully reproduces observed discharges, paving the way to satellite-driven hydrological applications.