Annual memory in the terrestrial water cycle

Berghuijs, Wouter R.; Woods, Ross A.; Anderson, Bailey J.; Hemshorn de Sánchez, Anna Luisa; Hrachowitz, Markus

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-1319-2025

Articles | Volume 29, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-1319-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-1319-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 29, issue 5

Research article

|

11 Mar 2025

Research article |

| 11 Mar 2025

Annual memory in the terrestrial water cycle

Wouter R. Berghuijs, Ross A. Woods, Bailey J. Anderson, Anna Luisa Hemshorn de Sánchez, and Markus Hrachowitz

Data sets

The Global Streamflow Indices and Metadata Archive - Part 1: Station catalog and Catchment boundary H. X. Do et al. https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.887477

GTWS-MLrec: Global terrestrial water storage reconstruction by machine learning from 1940 to present J. Yin https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10040927

GPCC Full Data Monthly Product Version 7.0 at 0.5°: Monthly Land-Surface Precipitation from Rain-Gauges built on GTS-based and Historic Data U. Schneider et al. https://doi.org/10.5676/DWD_GPCC/FD_M_V7_050

Short summary

Water balances of catchments will often strongly depend on their state in the recent past, but such memory effects may persist at annual timescales. We use global data sets to show that annual memory is typically absent in precipitation but strong in terrestrial water stores and also present in evaporation and streamflow (including low flows and floods). Our experiments show that hysteretic models provide behaviour that is consistent with these observed memory behaviours.