A global multi catchment and multi dataset synthesis for water fluxes and storage changes on land

Description

Earth's land water is studied by many separate communities, each with its own datasets that rarely get compared like for like. Mohanna Zarei and Georgia Destouni assembled a harmonised global synthesis covering thirty years, 1980 to 2010. It lines up four comparative datasets for the main flows and stores of water on land across 1,561 river catchments that do not overlap.

For each catchment the set shows rainfall's split into runoff, evaporation, and storage change, and whether those parts balance. Users can see where datasets agree and where they part ways, by region and over time. The authors offer the synthesis for spotting patterns, testing hypotheses and models, and building a shared picture of how land water is changing. Direct comparison, they argue, can unite fields that model the same water in isolation.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC11621441