Hydrology Commons^™

Evaluating Snow And Ice Cover In Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina, Zoe Pitman

Geosciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

Evaluating changes in snow and ice cover is an important field for studying climate change and its impacts. This evaluation is commonly done using remote sensing because of its ability to evaluate large areas. The purpose of this study is to determine the reliability of one remote sensing technology, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), by comparing it to in-situ snow and climate data from the weather station at the Austral Center for Scientific Research (CADIC). Data was converted from daily to monthly averages and was sorted into a series of graphs to compare the two data sets. Correlations were …

The Last Drought Frontier: Building A Drought Index For The State Of Alaska, Olivia Campbell

Dissertations & Theses in Natural Resources

Drought is characterized by periods of below average precipitation. There are five major types of drought recognized in the literature: meteorological, hydrological, agricultural, socioeconomic, and ecological. A relatively new concept in the drought literature is “snow drought.” A key part of the definition of drought is that it is not always accompanied by extreme heat. This means drought can occur even in cold climates, cold seasons, and higher latitudes and altitudes, like Alaska. Drought is a natural part of climate variability, but Alaska’s climate is changing faster than any other state in the United States. Alaska is no stranger to …

Modeling Spatial Distributions Of Tidal Marsh Blue Carbon Using Morphometric Parameters From Lidar, Bonnie Turek

Masters Theses

Tidal marshes serve as important “blue carbon” ecosystems that accrete large amounts of carbon with limited area. While much attention has been paid to the spatial variability of sedimentation within salt marshes, less work has been done to characterize spatial variability in marsh carbon density. Driven by tidal inundation, surface topography, and sediment supply, soil properties in marshes vary spatially with several parameters, including marsh platform elevation and proximity to the marsh edge and tidal creek network. We used lidar to extract these morphometric parameters from tidal marshes to map soil organic carbon (SOC) at the meter scale. Fixed volume …

Snow Distribution And Influence In Taylor Valley, Antarctica, Using Remote Sensing, Katherine Mcnulty, Peter Doran, Mark Salvatore, Suniti Karunatillake

LSU Master's Theses

The McMurdo Dry Valleys is the largest ice-free area in Antarctica, but seasonal snow covers the valley floors sporadically throughout the year. In this study, a model to estimate areal snow coverage from satellite imagery was created. An area-volume model was created to estimate the amount of snow water equivalent (SWE) from the snow area extracted from the imagery. Snow cover influences the total albedo, the hydrologic budget, and the soil moisture and soil temperature in Taylor Valley (TV). Quantifying snow precipitation in TV is challenging because snow redistributes with winds, sublimates, or melts within a short period. Previous estimates …

Spot1328 Meira Spit, Robert C. Mahon, Elizabeth J. Trower, Benjamin P. Smith, Tyler A. Lincoln, Juliana Olsen-Valdez, John S. Magyar, Cedric J. Hagen

2D Wave Spectral Data, South Arm, Great Salt Lake, Utah

Data in this folder are produced by a SoFarOcean Spotter wave buoy deployed along the south arm of the Great Salt Lake, near Antelope Island State Park from the period of July 13, 2021 through June 28, 2022, in relatively shallow water, approximately 1.6m.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Water depths for #1328 (Miera Spit) started at ~1.7 m, but dropped rapidly to 0.9 m on July 15, 2021 and dropped further to ~0.4 m on August 17, 2021. The timing of these rapid water depth changes matches the timing of buoy location changes when the anchor was dragged inshore by waves. When …

Quantifying Oil And Gas Industry Related Geohazard Using Radar Interferometry And Hydro-Geomechanical Modeling, Weiyu Zheng

Earth Sciences Theses and Dissertations

The Permian Basin, containing a large amount of oil and gas, has been intensively developed for hydrocarbon production. However, the hazards related to the oil and gas industry including surface deformation and the underlying mechanisms in this region have not been well known. My PhD study aims to monitor the geohazards in the Permian Basin and better comprehend the subsurface mechanisms with the aid of high-resolution and high-accuracy Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) images. Generally, as the pore pressure is influenced by wastewater injection/hydrocarbon production, the pressure changes can propagate to other surrounding underground and overlying rock/soil layers, resulting in …

Projected Long-Term Climate Trends Reveal The Critical Role Of Vapor Pressure Deficit For Soybean Yields In The Us Midwest, Wenguang Sun, David Fleisher, Dennis Timlin, Chittaranjan Ray, Zhuangji Wang, Sahila Beegum, Vangimalla Reddy

Faculty Publications from The Water Center

Extreme climate events including heat waves and droughts are projected to become more frequent under future climate change conditions. However, the mechanisms between soybean yields and climate factors, specifically involving variable rainfall and high heat episodes, are still unclear, particularly with respect to spatial trends in the United States (US) Midwest. A recently modified version of the model GLYCIM was used to evaluate rainfed soybean production across 12 states at a 10 km spatial resolution for three time periods (2011–2020, 2051–2060, 2091–2099) under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios 4.5 and 8.5. Results showed that except for the northernmost Midwest counties, …

Nebraska Statewide Groundwater-Level Monitoring Report 2022, Aaron R. Young, Mark E. Burbach, Sue Olafsen Lackey, Robert Matthew Joeckel, Jeffrey Westrop

Conservation and Survey Division

No abstract provided.

Pan-Arctic Soil Moisture Control On Tundra Carbon Sequestration And Plant Productivity, Donatella Zona, Peter M. Lafleur, Koen Hufkens, Beniamino Gioli, Barbara Bailey, George Burba, Eugénie S. Euskirchen, Jennifer D. Watts, Kyle A. Arndt, Mary Farina, John S. Kimball, Martin Heimann, Mathias Göckede, Martijn Pallandt, Torben R. Christensen, Mikhail Mastepanov, Efrén López-Blanco, Albertus J. Dolman, Roisin Commane, Charles E. Miller, Josh Hashemi, Lars Kutzbach, David Holl, Julia Boike, Christian Wille, Torsten Sachs, Aram Kalhori, Elyn R. Humphreys, Oliver Sonnentag, Gesa Meyer, Gabriel H. Gosselin, Philip Marsh, Walter C. Oechel

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Long-term atmospheric CO₂ concentration records have suggested a reduction in the positive effect of warming on high-latitude carbon uptake since the 1990s. A variety of mechanisms have been proposed to explain the reduced net carbon sink of northern ecosystems with increased air temperature, including water stress on vegetation and increased respiration over recent decades. However, the lack of consistent long-term carbon flux and in situ soil moisture data has severely limited our ability to identify the mechanisms responsible for the recent reduced carbon sink strength. In this study, we used a record of nearly 100 site-years of eddy covariance …

Importance Of Snowmelt On Soil Nitrate Leaching To Groundwater – A Model Study, Sahila Beegum, Arindam Malakar, Chittaranjan Ray, Daniel D. Snow

Faculty Publications from The Water Center

The movement of nitrate to surface water bodies during snow accumulation and melting has been extensively studied, but there are only limited studies on the influence of snow processes on nitrate leaching to groundwater. The present study investigated the impact of snow processes on nitrate leaching to groundwater based on a simulation modeling approach using HYDRUS-1D. HYDRUS-1D model has a temperature threshold-based snow model in addition to water, solute, and heat simulation components. The snow component in HYDRUS-1D was previously not applied to snow simulation studies since the method does not consider a detailed physical and process-based representation of snow …

Time Domain Reflectometry Waveform Interpretation With Convolutional Neural Networks, Zhuangji Wang, Shan Hua, Dennis Timlin, Yuki Kojima, Songtao Lu, Wenguang Sun, David Fleisher, Robert Horton, Vangimalla R. Reddy, Katherine Tully

Faculty Publications from The Water Center

Interpreting time domain reflectometry (TDR) waveforms obtained in soils with non-uniform water content is an open question. We design a new TDR waveform interpretation model based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that can reveal the spatial variations of soil relative permittivity and water content along a TDR sensor. The proposed model, namely TDR-CNN, is constructed with three modules. First, the geometrical features of the TDR waveforms are extracted with a simplified version of VGG16 network. Second, the reflection positions in a TDR waveform are traced using a 1D version of the region proposal network. Finally, the soil relative permittivity values …

Rainbow Beach Sediment Grain Size Analysis, Northampton, Massachusetts, Brian Yellen

Data and Datasets

This dataset was prepared by Brian Yellen, a research assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Yellen worked in conjunction with Melissa Grader of the USFWS and colleagues to conduct the associated field sampling.

This report provides information related to the substrate grain size at surveyed locations on Rainbow Beach on the Connecticut River in Northampton, MA (42.322125, -72.584928). This location is a known breeding site of the endangered puritan tiger beetle (PTB), Ellipsoptera puritana.

Nitrite Cycling In The Primary Nitrite Maxima Of The Eastern Tropical North Pacific, Nicole M. Travis, Colette L. Kelly, Margaret R. Mulholland, Karen L. Casciotti

OES Faculty Publications

The primary nitrite maximum (PNM) is a ubiquitous feature of the upper ocean, where nitrite accumulates in a sharp peak at the base of the euphotic zone. This feature is situated where many chemical and hydrographic properties have strong gradients and the activities of several microbial processes overlap. Near the PNM, four major microbial processes are active in nitrite cycling: ammonia oxidation, nitrite oxidation, nitrate reduction and nitrite uptake. The first two processes are mediated by the nitrifying archaeal/bacterial community, while the second two processes are primarily conducted by phytoplankton. The overlapping spatial habitats and substrate requirements for these microbes …

Globally Scalable Approach To Estimate Net Ecosystem Exchange Based On Remote Sensing, Meteorological Data, And Direct Measurements Of Eddy Covariance Sites, Ruslan Zhuravlev, Andrey Dara, André Luís Diniz Dos Santos, Oleg Demidov, George Burba

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Despite a rapid development of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) for carbon removal in recent years, the methods for evaluating NBS still have certain gaps. We propose an approach based on a combination of remote sensing data and meteorological variables to reconstruct the spatiotemporal variation of net ecosystem exchange from eddy-covariance stations. A Lagrangian particle dispersion model was used for upscaling satellite images and flux towers. We trained data-driven models based on kernel methods separately for each selected land-cover class. The results suggest that the proposed approach to quantifying carbon exchange on a medium-to-large scale by blending eddy covariance flux data with …

Role Of Social Determinants Of Health In Differential Respiratory Exposure And Health Outcomes Among Children, Jagadeesh Puvvula, Jill A. Poole, Yeongjin Gwon, Eleanor G. Rogan, Jesse E. Bell

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Background Attributes defining the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) are associated with disproportionate exposures to environmental hazards and differential health outcomes among communities. The dynamics between SDoH, disproportionate environmental exposures, and differential health outcomes are often specific to micro-geographic areas.

Methods This study focused on children less than 20 years of age who lived in Douglas County, Nebraska, during 2016–2019. To assess the role of SDoH in differential exposures, we evaluated the association between SDoH metrics and criteria pollutant concentrations and the association between SDoH and pediatric asthma exacerbations to quantify the role of SDoH in differential pediatric asthma outcomes. …

Precipitation Recorded In The Turkana Basin From 2005 To 2022., Acacia Leakey, Greg Henkes, Mae Saslaw, Dino Martins

Geosciences Research Data

This is a dataset of precipitation recorded at three sites in northern Kenya near Lake Turkana using standard rain gauges. The data was recorded at the Koobi Fora Research Station (3.947736, 36.186166) from March 2003 until 2006, at the Turkana Basin Institute’s Ileret facility (4.28510, 36.262158) from 2006 to 2022 and at the Turkana Basin Institute’s Turkwel facility (3.140825, 35.864599) from 2012 to 2022. The data was collected manually by TBI staff observing gradation lines on the collectors following rainfall events and recorded as a single total for each 24 hour period.

Berriasian–Valanginian Geochronology And Carbon-Isotope Stratigraphy Of The Yellow Cat Member, Cedar Mountain Formation, Eastern Utah, Usa, Robert M. Joeckel, Celina A. Suarez, Noah M. Mclean, Andreas Möller, Gregory A. Ludvigson, Marina B. Suarez, James I. Kirkland, Joseph Andrew, Spencer Kiessling, Garrett A. Hatzell

Conservation and Survey Division

The Early Cretaceous Yellow Cat Member of the terrestrial Cedar Mountain Formation in Utah, USA. has been interpreted as a “time-rich” unit because of its dinosaur fossils, prominent paleosols, and the results of preliminary chemostratigraphic and geochronologic studies. Herein, we refine prior interpretations with: (1) a new composite C-isotope chemostratigraphic profile from the well-known Utahraptor Ridge dinosaur site, which exhibits δ¹³C features tentatively interpreted as the Valanginian double-peak carbon isotope excursion (the so-called “Weissert Event”) and some unnamed Berriasian features; and (2) a new cryptotephra zircon eruption age of 135.10 ± 0.30/0.31/0.34 Ma (2σ) derived from the CA-ID-TIMS …

A Workshop On Using Nasa Airs Data To Monitor Drought For The U.S. Drought Monitor, Alireza Farahmand,, Sharon Ray, Heidar Thrastarson, Stephen Licata, Stephanie Granger, Brian Fuchs

Drought Mitigation Center Faculty Publications

Recent studies indicate that drought indicators based on near-surface air relative humidity (RH), air temperature (T), and air vapor pressure deficit (VPD), derived from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite can detect the onset of drought earlier than other drought indicators, specifically standardized precipitation index (SPI), which is widely used for drought onset detection. A recent study showed that standardized relative humidity index (SRHI) can detect drought signals earlier than SPI (Farahmand et al. 2015). Relative humidity is a climate variable defined as the ratio of air vapor pressure to saturated vapor pressure. Precipitation and relative …

Hydrodynamics And Sediment Transport In The Tidally Influenced James River, Ollie Gilchrest, Rip Hale

The Graduate School Posters

The tidally influenced James River is an important economic, ecologic, and cultural resource for VA residents. Tidal rivers have been historically understudied, however they are critical transition zones, the dynamics of which have implications for freshwater supply and sediment trapping. Globally, estimates suggest that >30% of fluvial sediment is trapped in the tidal zone, the location and dynamics of which are actively changing due to sea level rise and saltwater encroachment. In addition, analysis of historical water levels on the James River has shown a decrease in the tidal range since 1940. The present study combines >1-year’s worth of hydrographic …

Drivers Of Spatiotemporal Patterns Of Surface Water Inputs In A Catchment At The Rain-Snow Transition Zone Of The Water-Limited Western United States, E. Trujillo, J. Mcnamara

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Spatial and temporal dynamics of rainfall and snowmelt (i.e., surface water inputs, SWI) control soil moisture, groundwater recharge, and streamflow at annual, seasonal, and event scales. In the rain-snow transition zone, comprising a large portion of the mountainous western United States, there is limited understanding of the sensitivity of spatiotemporal SWI dynamics across hydrologically variable water years (WYs). We modeled rainfall and snowpack dynamics in a small headwater catchment (1.8 km²) spanning the rain-snow transition in southwestern Idaho, USA, for two hydrologically distinct WYs (2011 and 2014). In wet WY 2011 and dry WY 2014, total precipitation drove …