Research on groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) started earlier, but because there is no good identification and classification method, most of the related research is concentrated in Europe and Australia. In this study, the lower Yellow River basin in northern China, with well-developed karsts, was selected as the study area, and a four-diagnostic-criteria framework for identifying the GDEs based on remote sensing, GIS data dredging, and hydrogeological surveys was proposed.

Earth scientists assume that evaporation depends on the gradient in water vapour concentration (Fick’s law), but this is only true in an isothermal system. Temperature gradients can impact evaporation via the Soret effect. Here we evaluate the relative magnitude of the Soret effect and find that it is at least 2 orders of magnitude smaller than classical concentration-dependent mass (“Fickian”) diffusion. This result justifies the standard practice of assuming evaporation follows Fick’s law.

We show the results of the 2022 Groundwater Time Series Modelling Challenge; 15 teams applied data-driven models to simulate hydraulic heads, and three model groups were identified: lumped, machine learning, and deep learning. For all wells, reasonable performance was obtained by at least one team from each group. There was not one team that performed best for all wells. In conclusion, the challenge was a successful initiative to compare different models and learn from each other.

The goal is to remove the impact of meteorological drivers in order to uncover the unique landscape fingerprints of a catchment from streamflow data. Our results reveal an optimal two-feature summary for most catchments, with a third feature associated with aridity and intermittent flow that is needed for challenging cases. Baseflow index, aridity, and soil or vegetation attributes strongly correlate with learnt features, indicating their importance for streamflow prediction.

We present directional statistics to characterize seasonality, capturing the timing of streamflow (center of mass timing) and the strength of its seasonal cycle (concentration). Directional statistics are more robust than several widely used metrics to quantify streamflow seasonality. The introduced metrics can improve our understanding of streamflow seasonality and associated changes and can also be used to study the seasonality of other environmental fluxes within and beyond hydrology.

Soil moisture memory (SMM) shows how long soil stays moist after rain, impacting climate and ecosystems. Current models often overestimate SMM, causing inaccuracies in evaporation predictions. We enhanced a land model, Noah-MP, to include better water flow and ponding processes, and we tested it against satellite and field data. This improved model reduced overestimations and enhanced short-term predictions, helping create more accurate climate and weather forecasts.

We used a new method to measure how streamflow responds to precipitation across a network of watersheds in Iran. Our analysis shows that streamflow is more sensitive to precipitation when groundwater levels are shallower, climates are more humid, topography is steeper, and drainage basins are smaller. These results are a step toward more sustainable water resource management and more effective flood risk mitigation.

Our study compares neural network models for predicting discharge in ungauged basins. We evaluated convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent units (GRUs) using 28 years of weather data. CNNs showed the best accuracy, while GRUs were faster and nearly as accurate. Adding static features improved all models. The research enhances flood forecasting and water management in regions lacking direct measurements, offering efficient and accurate predictive tools.

In water-scarce regions, precipitation is a highly variable and essential resource for crop production. Developing countries like India have an uneven distribution of rain gauges, so reliance on satellite- and reanalysis-based precipitation products is critical for their prudent management. Hence, this study statistically evaluated different precipitation products against station data for water-scarce regions in Tamil Nadu and found that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis version 5 Land (ERA5-Land) performed the best, followed by the Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP).

Understanding groundwater flow is crucial for both environmental and economic reasons. In our study, the dynamic interaction of the forces driving groundwater flow is presented, partly in synthetic models and partly in a real deep geothermal reservoir. We point out that ignoring certain driving forces can lead to oversimplification of groundwater flow and even misinterpretation of the phenomena, causing environmental problems or economic losses.

A systematic laboratory experiment elucidates two-phase heat transport due to water flow in saturated porous media to understand thermal propagation in aquifers. Results reveal delayed thermal arrival in the solid phase, depending on grain size and flow velocity. Analytical modeling using standard local thermal equilibrium (LTE) and advanced local thermal non-equilibrium (LTNE) theory fails to describe temperature breakthrough curves, highlighting the need for more advanced numerical approaches.

Data-driven techniques have shown the potential to outperform process-based models in rainfall–runoff simulations. Hybrid models, combining both approaches, aim to enhance accuracy and maintain interpretability. Expanding the set of test cases to evaluate hybrid models under different conditions, we test their generalization capabilities for extreme hydrological events.

Here we propose a new mathematically robust and cost-effective model to improve glacial lake water storage estimation. We have also provided a dataset of measured water storage in glacial lakes through field depth measurements. Our model incorporates an automated calculation process and outperforms previous ones, achieving an average relative error of only 14 %. This research offers a valuable tool for researchers seeking to improve the risk assessment of glacial lake outburst floods.

Soil loss results from the hydrological and hydromechanical responses. The soil loss intensity theoretically relates to the soil water storage and the suction stress. This work contributes to exhibiting the close relationship between erosion intensity in the bed and on the slope and the soil water storage and suction stress. The results of this work highlight that antecedent precipitation should be considered in predicting soil loss in the permanent gully rather than solely from rainfall amount.

The most mysterious part of the hydrological cycle is the infiltration of water into porous soil. In this process, water enters the soil, some of it is retained in the soil or evaporates, and the remaining water continues to move below and through the rock environment. The physical description of infiltration, specifically the dependence of the infiltration rate on the flow, shows very unusual features that are beyond the normal human experience. Our paper is devoted to their elucidation.

Statkraft requires projections of future streamflow to plan hydropower investments. Setting up a hydrological model for new regions can be too time-consuming to meet the often short delivery deadlines. We have developed an interpretable machine learning method that links streamflow to precipitation and temperature, and can serve as a first screening approach. This method is then applied to climate model simulations of precipitation and temperature to obtain streamflow projections for Brazil.

Existing correction methods may introduce large errors, and more seriously cause unrealistic negative values in P, ET and Q in up to 10 % of cases. A novel IWE-Res method is proposed to improve the accuracy and consistency of corrected satellite-based water budget component data. In most river basins (except cold regions), the best correction is achieved by adjusting 40 % to 90 % of the total water imbalance error.

How drought impacts communities is complex and not yet fully understood. We examined a disaster dataset and compared various drought measures to pinpoint affected regions. Our new combined drought indicator (CDI) was found to be the most effective in identifying drought events compared to other traditional drought indices. This underscores the CDI's importance in evaluating drought risks and directing attention to the most impacted areas.

Mining activities threaten aquatic ecosystems, soil ecosystems, and human health worldwide. This study establishes a high-quality database and a national 0.5° gridded dataset to reveal the status and spatial pattern of mining-affected water pollution, human health risks, and potential multifaceted challenges in China. It provides in-depth insights to guide policymakers in designing differentiated management strategies for the sustainable development of mines.

This paper reformulates the model equations of the distributed Xinanjiang hydrological model in fully differential form and incorporates two-dimensional slope runoff routing methods, which are solved using appropriate numerical techniques. The main contribution is to provide an approach for distributed hydrological models that have evolved from lumped counterparts to reduce inherited numerical errors and to improve terrain representation, thereby enhancing their physical realism and simulation accuracy.

This review highlights how geological structures like faults and fractures influence groundwater potential in volcanic rocks of Borena Sayint, northwestern Ethiopian Plateau. These structures enhance secondary porosity, affecting aquifer behaviour. The study stresses integrating geological, geophysical, and hydrological data for sustainable groundwater management in tectonically complex volcanic regions.

Water budget non-closure is a widespread phenomenon among multisource datasets which undermines the robustness of hydrological inferences. This study proposes a Multisource Dataset Correction Framework grounded in Physical Hydrological Process Modelling to enhance water budget closure, termed PHPM-MDCF. We examined the efficiency and robustness of the framework using the CAMELS dataset and achieved an average reduction of 49 % in total water budget residuals across 475 CONUS basins.

We present a new method to calculate the chance of heavy downpour and the maximum rainfall expected over a 25-year period. It is designed to analyse global climate models' reproduction of past and future climates. For the Nordic countries, it projects a wetter climate in the future with increased intensity but not necessarily more wet days. The analysis also shows that rainfall intensity is sensitive to future greenhouse gas emissions, while the number of wet days appears to be less affected.

It is crucial to improve global precipitation estimates to understand water-related disasters and water resources. This study proposes a new methodology to interpolate global precipitation fields from ground rain gauge observations using ensemble data assimilation and the precipitation of a numerical weather prediction model. Our estimates agree better with independent rain gauge observations than existing precipitation estimates, especially in mountainous or rain-gauge-sparse regions.

The satellites GRACE and GRACE-FO observe continental terrestrial water storage (TWS) changes. With over 20 years of data, we can look into long-term variations in the East Africa Rift region. We focus on analysing the interannual TWS variations compared to meteorological data and observations of the water storage compartments. We found strong influences of natural precipitation variability and human actions over Lake Victoria's water level.

This study presents a multi-method framework assessing managed aquifer recharge (MAR) and extraction effects on groundwater dynamics in a typical temperate semi-arid fissured karst system, Jinan's Baotu Spring area. Results show MAR and extraction significantly influence karst groundwater levels and quality. The complementary techniques enhance the quantitative research accuracy and provide practical references for MAR in karst regions with similar hydrogeological conditions.

The 2021 drought in Quebec showcased the province’s potential vulnerability. This study uses a storyline approach to explore the impacts of future extreme droughts under +2 °C and +3 °C global warming scenarios. Results show that future droughts similar to that of 2021 could worsen significantly, with water levels dropping for longer periods and impacting ecosystems and human activities.

Understanding the changes in water movement in earth is crucial for everyone. To quantify this water movement there are several techniques. We examined how different methods of estimating evaporation impact predictions of various types of water movement across Europe. We found that, while these methods generally agree on whether changes are increasing or decreasing, they differ in magnitude. This means selecting the right evaporation method is crucial for accurate predictions of water movement.

Groundwater can be replenished by rainfall that percolates from the surface to the water table. The amount of rainfall that is needed to generate this groundwater recharge is hard to measure. We determined this rainfall amount by identifying recharge events as water percolates from the surface, through a cave. During our monitoring, an intense fire occurred above the cave, and we were able to quantify any change in the amount of rainfall necessary to generate recharge before and after the fire.

This study combines the global hydrological model PCRaster Global Water Balance with the World Food Studies crop model to analyze feedbacks between hydrology and crop growth. It quantifies one-way and two-way interactions, revealing patterns in crop yield and irrigation water use. Dynamic interactions enhance understanding of climate variability impacts on food production, highlighting the importance of two-way model coupling for accurate assessments.

The fate of liquid water from melting snow in winter and spring is difficult to understand in the mountains. This work uses a multi-instrumental network to accurately monitor the dynamics of snowmelt and infiltration at different depths in the ground and at different altitudes. The results show that melting snow quickly infiltrates into the upper layers of the soil but is also quickly transferred through the soil along the slopes towards the river.

The Aral Sea is both an example of large-scale environmental degradation caused by human activity and a message of hope through its partial restoration. Our study shows that the restored part of the Aral Sea is now healthy in terms of vertical mixing and oxygenation. However, small perturbations of water level or transparency could significantly alter the entire ecosystem. The results contribute to understanding the consequences of large-scale lake management worldwide.

The review highlights the need to integrate urban land surface and hydrological models to better predict and manage compound climate events in cities. We find that inadequate representation of water surfaces, hydraulic systems and detailed building representations are key areas for improvement in future models. Coupled models show promise but face challenges at regional and neighbourhood scales. Interdisciplinary communication is crucial to enhance urban hydrometeorological simulations.

We consider how well one can identify hydraulic conductivity that varies from place to place by using only measurements obtained at a finite number of groundwater monitoring wells. In particular, we relate how accurately features (meaning connected high- or low-conductivity regions) are identified to their size and to well spacing, and we examine which kinds of information are most valuable. When feature size exceeds 4 times the well spacing, better-than-random identification is possible.

This work demonstrates that seasonal forecasts of soil moisture are a valuable resource for groundwater management in the areas of the Central Mediterranean where longer memory timescales are found. In particular, they show significant correlation coefficients and forecast skill for the deepest soil moisture at 289 cm depth. Wet and dry events can be predicted 6 months in advance, and, in general, dry events are better captured than wet events.

We create China’s first open county-level urban flood dataset (2000–2022) using news media data with the help of deep learning.  The dataset reflects both natural and societal influences and includes 7595 urban flood events across 2051 counties, covering 46 % of China’s land area. It reveals the predominance of summer floods, an upward trend since 2000, and a decline from southeast to northwest. Notably, some highly developed regions show a decrease, likely due to improved flood management.